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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

One more thing anti-vaccers don’t get…

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I wasn’t going to jump into this conversation, but I want to add another dimension to the discussion of the benefits vs. dangers of vaccinating. I feel qualified by the fact that my first-born child had a severe reaction to her first DPT vaccination many years ago.

We got her first vaccination on time when she was two months old. Within ten minutes, she was screeching non-stop, like a threatened animal. We got sent home anyway, where she continued to screech for many hours until she had a seizure and went into a coma for three days. Happily, she woke up and seemed perfectly fine. She didn’t have any long term neurological damage.  

Vaccinations carry some risk — but the folks who produce those vaccinations work hard to mitigate that risk. I know this, because my first-born was a high-risk recipient for her entire childhood.

She still got all of her vaccinations on schedule throughout her childhood — sans the pertussis vaccine that caused the problem. When she was in college, she elected to have a new version of the pertussis vaccine that wasn’t as likely to cause a reaction to sensitive people. She had the vaccination under observation, and she tolerated it well.

Here is the thing: Western medicine screws up some things, certainly, but some things they do really well. Public health is something they do really well. They aren’t just vaccinating people with no thought to risk, in fact, they rigorously keep track of the danger, and do their best to mitigate against it.

Today, it’s a lot more dangerous to skip vaccines than to get them, especially in the areas where it’s popular to skip vaccinations all together. When most people are vaccinated, unvaccinated people have sympathetic immunity — they don’t get a disease because their community is immune. They don’t get exposed. Today, we’re at a crossing point where sympathetic immunity doesn’t exist…

Folks who have religious objections to vaccination often attribute their children’s lack of preventable disease to healthy lifestyle or faith. A correlation does not imply causality. Their children’s lack of preventable disease came from sympathetic immunity.

Please have a look at this article by Amy Parker, an adult child of anti-vaccers.

As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox, some of which are vaccine preventable. In my twenties I got precancerous HPV and spent 6 months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.


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30 comments

  2. JanF

    From 2010 but obviously something that we need to keep repeating …

    “So even if vaccination did cause autism – WHICH IT F$#KING DOESN’T!!!! – anti-vaccination would still be BULLSH*T.”

  3. JanF

    And to no one’s surprise, the Anti-Science Republican Party is weighing in on the side of “parental choice”. As one pundit said, what is it about the word “choice” that makes Republicans react reflexively to embrace it, even if it will lead to needless deaths?

    Vaccination debate flares in GOP presidential race, alarming medical experts

    Medical experts reacted with alarm Monday as two top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination appeared to question whether child vaccinations should be mandatory – injecting politics into an emotional issue that has taken on new resonance with a recent outbreak of measles in the United States.

    First, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, while visiting a vaccine laboratory here, called for “some measure of choice” on whether shots guarding against measles and other diseases should be required for children.

    Then, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an ophthalmologist who is also readying a 2016 campaign, said in two U.S. television interviews that he thinks most vaccines should be voluntary, citing “many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

    And, no, WaPo “both sides” don’t do it, certainly not as elected officials or candidates pandering to their base.

    “When you see educated people or elected officials giving credence to things that have been completely debunked, an idea that’s been shown to be responsible for multiple measles and pertussis outbreaks in recent years, it’s very concerning,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh. He called the comments from Paul particularly troubling because Paul is a doctor.[…]

    Seth Mnookin, a professor at MIT who has written a book on the vaccination debate called “The Panic Virus,” called the comments from Christie and Paul “incredibly, in­cred­ibly irresponsible.”

    Such remarks, he said, “basically fail at the first duty of a politician, which is to calm his constituents in moments of irrational crisis.”

    Regarding Rand Paul being a doctor, let’s try this: “doctor”. Much better.

  5. DeniseVelez

    who are liberal and well-heeled have given up world travel.

    There are quite a few shots needed, or recommended, though not required for different parts of the world

    See travel doc pages for more details:

    http://www.thetraveldoctor.com…

    Routine Immunizations for travel

    The Immunization Practices Advisory Committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all persons be up-to-date on routine immunizations, regardless of travel plans. Outbreaks of measles, polio, and pertussis have occurred in developing countries where populations were inadequately immunized, and susceptible visitors have been stricken with travel-acquired measles and poliovirus infections.  There have now even been outbreaks of measles and pertussis in the U.S.

    The primary series of tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, MMR and polio vaccines is customarily given in childhood. Surveillance data suggests that a significant percentage of North Americans over the age of 20 do not update their tetanus/diphtheria immunizations at the recommended 10-year interval. Although polio boosters are not routinely given in North America, they are recommended before travel to known polio endemic and developing areas.

    I recently had to get booster shots when planning to go to Algeria.  

    Years ago, when I was in the Congo, I got no shots entering the country.  When I was getting ready to leave, WHO blocked me from departing and I had to get several shots in the same day…which wasn’t comfortable, and I had a reaction to one of them..still don’t know which one.  

  6. Portlaw

    Immigration hardliner Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said Tuesday that “illegal aliens” may be to blame for the recent measles outbreak that began in California and has continued to spread to other states.

    In a radio interview highlighted by ThinkProgress, Brooks, a vocal opponent of recent immigration reform attempts, told host Matt Murphy that he believes unvaccinated immigrants could be spreading the respiratory disease.

    “I don’t think there is any health care professional who has examined the facts who could honestly say that Americans have not died because the disease is brought into America by illegal aliens who are not properly health care screened, as lawful immigrants are,” Brooks said. “Unfortunately, our kids just aren’t prepared for a lot of the diseases that come in and are borne by illegal aliens.”

     

    And there is more here  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

  7. JanF

    And when you add Rand Paul’s comments to the mix, well:

    Coming after Chris Christie’s similar comments over the weekend, it is now incumbent upon us to ask whether the anti-vaccination theories are on their way to becoming one of those conservative conjuring words, like “Keystone XL pipeline” or “school choice.” This is especially true since both Christie and Paul have framed their remarks with boilerplate conservative defenses of parental rights and personal freedoms. So is the measles virus the new handgun? Will dozens of sick kids in California join dozens of dead kids in Connecticut as the price we have to pay for our freedoms? Are we going to Teach The Controversy on this one, too. Is this, like The Bell Curve was for Andrew Sullivan and The New Republic, Open For Debate? It’s one thing to dance away from science on global warming. It’s quite another to have one of our only two political parties line itself up against medical science.

    They have. I worry that people won’t care.

  8. JanF

    Once A Vaccine Skeptic, This Mom Changed Her Mind.

    What I found interesting was this passage:

    “Also, our perceptions are often shaped by the communities we choose to join,” [author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts. David] Ropeik says. In Russo’s case, that community was self-described “crunchy moms” who distrust mainstream medicine. But there are plenty of other communities with subgroups that reject vaccination for other reasons, he says.

    “There’s conservatism: I don’t like government butting in. There’s libertarianism: Leave me alone I want to decide for myself. There’s environmentalism, there’s religion,” Ropeik says.

    And for a long time, Ropeik says, these subgroups didn’t have to confront a downside to rejecting vaccines. “There is the sense that the diseases are largely gone, so why take even a small risk for no benefit,” he says.

    Exactly. There was not much of a downside because few people, in our country at least, had seen what can happen with an unimmunized population. Those who are still denying it, after seeing what happened in California, deserve our scorn.  

  9. JanF

    Well, Matt, the only presidential candidates in favor of parental choice on vaccinating against serious diseases are Republicans.

    And Republicans have a well-known anti-science bias.

    Yes, there are liberal people who won’t vaccinate their children but you would be hard pressed to find liberal politicians supporting that stand. Both sides DON’T do it.

  11. HappyinVT

    “The debate over vaccinations continues …”

    What debate?!  There should be no debate.  Vaccine or keep your snotty-nosed kids 🙂 at home.  The End

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