Withholding Vaccines, Bad Idea

Brent Tantillo • October 20, 2009 • Uncategorized

While I sympathize greatly with parents of autistic children, many of these parents are encouraging others to not vaccinate their children for fear that it was vaccinations that caused their children to obtain this condition. Wired Magazine in this month’s edition explores this phenomenon, which has brought right and left together with Hollywood’s elite, with the most actively against vaccinations being Jenny McCarthy (a parent of an autistic child), Jim Carrey (McCarthy’s other half), and pundits Don Imus, and Joe Scarborough together with political elites Sen. Joe Lieberman and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. These folks believe that vaccinations are the cause of autism, however as Wired points out, there is no evidence supporting this theory, only conjecture and hyperbole.

What we do know though is all this hot air about vaccinations is having an affect, and it’s not good.

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

Those on the Right must resist the temptation to be contrarian, and use reason on this one. While the anti-vaccine crowd often invokes arguments that vaccinations will be forced upon Americans, nothing could be further from the truth, even in the case of swine flu. We must resist calls that vaccinations are elements of social control, and rather recognize them for what they are: a byproduct of the ingenuity of America’s remarkable healthcare economy.

In 2002, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, published a study which looked at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands. The study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because as Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village to ward off disease, “unless your friends and neighbors also buy in,” the vaccines aren’t going to work.

And maybe that’s the one thing we can all agree with Hillary on.

Share This Entry: