Amy Wallace has an excellent article in Wired about the irrational, wasteful and dangerous creature known as the anti-vaccination movement. It’s an excellent piece of reality-based journalism because it not only points out that these people are wrong about everything but it also shows how amazingly stubborn and vicious they can be in defense of their wrongness. And it’s funny:
At this year’s Autism One conference in Chicago, I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye as I walked past a long line of booths pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies (some believe a gluten-free diet alleviates the symptoms of autism), hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.
To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism” onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy (the controversial — and risky — administration of certain chemicals that leech metals from the body), and Lupron (a medicine that shuts down testosterone synthesis).
“infrared sauna”? Awesome. “neuro-feedback machine”? Sounds science-y. But the winner has to be “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism”. Such a wonderfully math-y looking slogan, and it employs precise scientific concepts like “more”.
What the article only touches on briefly, however, is why. What would possess relatively prosperous and well educated people to trust their children’s health to provable quackery? Here’s the brief touch:
Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.
This, combined with the perennial susceptibility of human beings to slickly peddled easy answers, is the real crux of the problem. It was a mere fifty years ago, after all, that the polio vaccine began to be widely administered. It essentially wiped out polio in the US and it was rightly hailed as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. There weren’t a lot of overly concerned parents trying to keep the vaccine away from their kids and one of the big reasons is that polio was fucking scary. It killed, it maimed, and it was all too common.
Polio isn’t scary to most Americans any longer because they have no experience with it. The same is true for the rest of the diseases the vaccines for which the anti-vaccination crowd fears. Of all the frightened people who read sites like the reprehensible Age of Autism how many of them have ever known, or even heard of, someone who had a serious case of polio? Or rubella? Or the mumps? Or any of the other mostly childhood diseases that have been kept to such insignificant numbers by large scale vaccinations?
They don’t see these diseases as any kind of real threat and that makes them vulnerable to the kind of horseshit that anti-vaccine people peddle. Snake oil salesmen, of all varieties, have always employed two main tools: false hope and scary consequences. In the case of the anti-vaccination people the false hope is the shimmering mirage of a risk free childhood and the scary consequences are the parental nightmare of a damaged child.
This myopic thinking, that puts the diseases themselves out of mind and concentrates on the tiny risk of the vaccines, is a byproduct of the “perfect parent” complex that’s developed in this country. All the Fretful Mother magazines, talk shows, and websites have implanted the idea that if you show your kids flash cards when they’re infants they’ll go to Harvard, that if you keep them away from anything even the least bit dirty they’ll never get sick, that if you do everything just right you can ensure what every parent wants out of their kids: a healthy adult. That it’s a fiction, that life is always messy, and that there is no way to eliminate risk, or even to minimize it since everything is tradeoff, gets lost in the shuffle. No amount of organic food, safety nail clippers or anything else can 100% guarantee that your child makes it to adulthood. It is an impossibility.
Vaccines are not risk free, but neither is anything else. Information is Beautiful has a great chart (via) displaying the relative risks of another vaccine, the one against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. The number of people vaccinated is a great green sea on your screen whereas the number of people dying within one year of vaccination (there isn’t even any mention that they died from the vaccine) is so small that it wouldn’t even take up one pixel on your monitor.
Meanwhile, not vaccinating your kids is like patrolling your neighborhood for panel vans while Cousin Steve, the thrice convicted child molester, stays home to babysit. Except it’s actually worse than that because every child that isn’t vaccinated raises the risk that other kids will become sick. So Cousin Steve isn’t just watching your kid, the whole play group is under his tender care.
Vaccines are about as safe and logical as things get, but that isn’t enough to deter the lunatic fringe and it’s good to see mainstream journalism exposing them for the nutters they really are. That it’s an understandable form of nuttery just makes people that much more susceptible to it and makes detailed, point-by-point articles that much more welcome.
