11
Street roots
April 29, 2011
A pox on anti-vaccine activism and the doctors behind it
BY SEAN HUGHES
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
father takes his infant daughter to
¿A receive a round of early childhood
X JLvaccines. Two hours after the
injections, she has the first of what prove to
be many seizures. It’s easy to understand
why the father would think the vaccine had
caused his daughter’s seizures.
Events like this, promoted by the anti
vaccine movement, have led to decreases in
vaccination rates and outbreaks of diseases
once eliminated from the United States -
including on Seattle’s Vashon Island. But as
Paul Offit shows in his methodical “Deadly
Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement
Threatens Us All,”
■■■ careful, well-designed
scientific studies have
Deadly Choices:
absolved vaccines
How the Anti-
from causing any of
Vaccine Movement the chronic diseaseê
Threatens Us All
they’ve been alleged
By Paul A. Offit,
to cause, from mental
M.D., Basic Books, disability to autism
2011, Hardcover,
and diabetes.
$27.50
Numerous brain
and genetic
abnormalities cause
seizure disorders,
mental disability and other tragic early
childhood conditions. Children bom with
these abnormalities will develop these
conditions. Young children also receive,
numerous vaccines, so in some cases, the
first sÿmptoms of these early childhood
conditions appear shortly after a
vaccination.,
What seems like causality is in fact .
coincidence, arid that has been proven by
careful follow-up with individual children
who had their first seizures or other
symptoms shortly after being vaccinated.
Tliis is illustrated by a tragic «tory shared-m
“Deadly Choices:” A father wanted his infant
son to be vaccinated, but after waiting in a
long line, gave up and took him home
unvaccinated. Several hours later, he found
his son dead from Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome. Offit élaborâtes: “One tan only
imagine what the father would have felt if
his son had received (the vaccine) several
hours earlier.”
REUTÉRS/FRED THORNHILL
A family waits its turn for vaccinations in Lakefield Ontario, Canada
While it’s understandable that a parent
might suspect that a vaccine caused her
child’s disability, it’s unconscionable that
anti-vaccine advocates and some doctors —
people who should know better — promote
that false belief, endangering many lives in
the process. It is these individuals who are
the primary subject of Offit’s book.
* Anti-vaccine activism has been around as
long as vaccines. In the mid-1800s, a vocal
feared medical advances and effectively used
mass marketing.
The other similarity between historical
and modern-day anti-vâccine movements
that Offit cites is more tragic: These
movements cause children to become sick,
disabled and die of diseases that vaccines
can prevent. And the consequences don’t
just fall bn those who choose to not
vaccinate their children. Some medical t
moyexpent iro se * to ^ p p p se th e p r s tv a c c in e ,
c o n d itio n sp re v e n tth o se afflicted from
Edward Jenner’s smallpox inoculation. That
movement shared many traits with present
day anti-vaccine movements: Activists .
claimed that doctors were evil, and evoked
paranoia; they alleged vaccines caused
harm; they called vaccines unnatural and
against God; they rejected germ theory,
favored alternative medicine; and they
receiving vaccines so they, and those too
young to have been vaccinated, rely on
everyone else to be immunized. Even those
who have received their vaccinations may be
at risk; a small percentage of vaccinations
fail to create immunity in the recipients.
Outbreaks of vacdqe-preventable diseases
are especially concerning today. Parents,
Fifty Thousand
by Dee Allen ,
Human flesh
And live electricity.
A deadly combination,
If any exists —
From a small
Hand-held device the size & shape
Of a supermarket price-tag dispenser,
Fifty thousand volts.
From a pair of tiny steel prongs.
Micro-conductors,
Fifty thousand volts.
From one shot to the body,
Fifty thousand volts.
From five shots coming
From five different directions going for
One frightened, cornered body,
Two hundred fifty thousand volts.
Organs fail. Love muscle stops. Body slumps over.
Did “excited delirium” cause this fatality?
Enquiring minds want to know.
Without a jury trial, without judge’s orders,
Cops have always presided over
Ceremonies of capital punishment
With fifty thousand volts per shot on their side,
Executions are done much quicker.
The electric chair is long gone. Finished. Obsolete.
Meet its
Portable replacement
and even some doctors, who have never
seen diseases like measles, Hib
(Haemophilus influenzae type b) and
whooping cough don’t know the symptoms,
so they may not recognize the disease, and
thus not care for children appropriately —
something that may include quarantining
the children. Some doctors are growing
concerned that their waiting rooms are
becoming infectious places, where those
who are unvaccinated risk coming into
contact with children affected by
preventable diseases.
And some doctors are beginning to fight
back by refusing to treat unvaccinated
children. This is a difficult issue,
representing a “lose-lose situation” for
doctors. By refusing to see unvaccinated
children, they express that “vaccines are so
importarit that they cannot be asked to
withhold them.” But by refusing to see the
children, they also “lose any chance of
convincing parents of the value of vaccines.
Worse still, these children will likely remain
unimmunized and vulnerable.” The pressure
of protecting all those in their waiting
rooms, though, is strong enough to move
some doctors to make this decision.
Pro-vaccine activists are responding in
other ways, too, and this offers a chance to
return to our own Vashon Island. The island
has lower than average rates of vaccination,
which means some Islanders worry, for
example, about an outbreak of whooping
cough, also called pertussis. One concerned
Vashon resident, Celina Yarkin, began
making displays at schools and health clinics
explaining the importance of vaccination
and urging other Vashon parents to make
the choice. .
Seeing other solutions as unlikely, and
being unwilling to accept a steady increase
in deaths from preventable diseases, Offit
puts his hope in activists like Yarkin
convincing parents to administer vaccines to
their children. “Deadly Choices” is itself a
significant step in that direction: Parents
should read it because it will leave them
feeling confident and safe about their choice
to vaccinate their children.
Originally published by Real Change
Newspaper, Seattle, Wash.