My friend, Cary, posted a link on his Facebook page to a map of recent outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases, standing up for the importance of vaccinations. (The link’s below.) Cary’s a wonderful middle school teacher, an incredibly talented musician, and a thoughtful guy. And in this case, he’s absolutely right. I wrote the following in response to a couple of his friends who were the non-vaccinating objects of his original post and responded precisely as we’ve come to expect from the anti-vaccination movement: "There’s mercury in them thar vaccines! And we give far too many of them to our poor pincushion kids! And their efficacy is overblown with lies and damn lies so big pharma companies can make big money and pay off docs in the process! And they have other incredibly harmful side effects!"
Every bit of that is what, in distinctly un-scientific terms, would be called hogwash or bullshit. The biggest trouble is, real scientists have had to spend their real time and energy refuting this crap. Ugh.
I know we’re fighting a battle that some people for some reason just don’t want us to win, but here’s what I wrote in reply:
Dear Cary’s-non-vaccinating-friends (and mine): I know you mean well. I think highly of you. You’re my friend, too. We all want our kids to be happy and healthy, and most of us want everyone else’s kids to be happy and healthy, too. We all also like to be right, and it can be very hard to accept that a long-held belief just doesn’t hold up.
The map Cary posted was produced by the Council on Foreign Relations, whose mission is essentially to make the U.S. a better citizen of the world. The link to the actual map is more interesting, because you can toggle it by year and see the increases in outbreaks as more and more people are convinced not to vaccinate, decreasing herd immunity. (http://www.cfr.org/interactives/GH_Vaccine_Map/index.html#map)
Anecdotes about doctors ignoring reaction and death from vaccines just for money are particularly hypocritical considering that the patron saint of the anti-vaccination movement fabricated data for his own financial benefit, leading to many of the preventable disease outbreaks and deaths on the map Cary posted. They’re also baseless. If they were true, there would be some actual data somewhere.
Herd immunity is not a myth. If it were, smallpox would only have been eradicated by immunizing nearly everyone in the whole world, and India would not have seen zero polio cases in the last three years. Herd immunity is what has thus far kept the completely preventable outbreaks of these diseases (which should have been eradicated already) from being any more widespread.
There is no mercury in the vaccines routinely given to our children. There was never enough to endanger us. There is a trace, as a preservative, in some current incarnations of the flu vaccine. Most childhood vaccines never contained Thimerosal, and those that did have been reformulated without, because, if I’m not mistaken, actual scientists thought they could appease anti-vaccination outcry from y'all without significantly impacting the efficacy of the vaccines. They were right about efficacy and wrong about appeasement so far, unfortunately. (http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228#t3)
I'm so happy that people believe nutrition can have or has had such a wonderful impact on their health. It very likely has, and that's wonderful! It is, however, anecdote. It's not data. The safety of the current recommended vaccination schedule was proven in thousands of trials before it was then safely administered to millions of our children, most of whom are now safe from preventable disease, and without horrible side effects. That's data.
Vaccines don’t cause autism. They just don’t. There have been zero studies demonstrating a link between vaccines and autism. Zero. 0. None. There have been many studies demonstrating NO causal link between vaccines and autism. How many? A lot. All of them. That’s a statistically significant number.
Only in very, very rare instances do vaccines do any harm at all, and those instances are statistically insignificant enough to warrant risking that rare harm in order to protect our children and your children and everyone else’s children from diseases that have wreaked real and significant harm on many prior generations of our children and your children and everyone else’s children. I’m pretty sure that none of this hard won truth will have any impact on you or your choices. I’m hoping someone else might read it and pass it along, helping our herd.
What galls me most about this is the thought of all the time and energy our immunologists and epidemiologists - people who have given their lives and careers to protecting our children and your children and everyone else’s children - have spent refuting these vaccine fallacies. That’s time that could have been spent finding other cures. This anti-vaccine movement has not only caused disease and death where there should be so much less, it’s kept us from preventing even more disease and death. That’s what really hurts my heart about this whole discussion.
