The Real Problem With Anti-Vaxxers

Whooping cough under a microscope

Earlier this year, I blogged for Boise Weekly about a whooping cough outbreak in Idaho and eastern Washington. The disease, which is highly contagious and particularly dangerous to infants, had been pretty much cornered in the 20th century by a vaccination campaign. In late 2013, however, it had cropped up near Pullman, Wash., and in Idaho's Marsh Valley. At the time, I wondered why, when we can imprison people for knowingly transmitting HIV, we can't do the same to parents who pose a health risk to their communities by deliberately not vaccinating their children.

Failing to vaccinate disgusts me. We walk past idiots every day—people who deny the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate, who claim the Earth is 5,000 years old, or aren't climate scientists but are pretty sure global warming, er, climate change is a liberal scare tactic—but they pose no immediate threat to anyone. Anti-vaxxers are a different breed of idiot. They're a direct threat to everyone around them. If an anti-vaxxer picks her nose and uses a handrail or a doorknob, that doorknob or handrail becomes a public health hazard. They do this because they mistrust the medical establishment, and couch their ugly gripe with modern medicine in terms of reasonable doubt and "researching both sides of the issue." 

While randomly surfing social media this afternoon, I noticed that a friend had posted a link to an Atlantic article containing an interview with the son of polio vaccine-developer Jonas Salk. According to the article, in 1952, there were 60,000 reported cases of polio in America. 3,000 of those cases were fatal, and another 21,000 left victims paralyzed. In 1955, Salk developed a vaccine for the illness, and less than a decade later, the disease had all but disappeared. Oct. 28 would have been Salk's 100th birthday.

Below my friend's link was a comment that read:

"This is a really heart felt article! I'm researching both sides of the argument currently. Here's an article that talks about the downside of those very same polio vaccinations that were given to children in 1950-1963 that contained SV40 which doctors discovered later on in brain tumors of their patients and which was also linked to cancer of the bones. I'm not entirely against vaccinations, but it seems very hard to know the long term effects of many of the vaccinations that are being rampantly given to people these days [sic]"

It was followed by a second comment made by the same person:

"On the flip side there are other studies that will claim SV40 can't be proven to have ever been linked to cancer. I guess that's the beauty of medicine and science; It's all based on hypotheses! I'd love if more people posted about this argument."

To be completely fair, this person never said she wasn't vaccinated, or hadn't vaccinated any children she might have. But if you feel like banging your head against the wall when people say liberals are intolerant of conservatives' point of view (I personally have this argument frequently w/r/t climate change), try convincing someone that the vaccine movement wasn't a secret vehicle for cancer, autism, or God knows what. Science and medicine aren't based on hypotheses—it's propelled by them. Disciplines like science and medicine are based on facts, and when it comes to vaccines, the proof is in the pudding: Tens of thousands of people contracted polio, smallpox and whooping cough in America every year, and within a few years of a vaccine being developed, those diseases were largely relegated to the history books.

Did a virus sneak its way into polio vaccines? Was the virus used as a vehicle for the vaccine in some way, but was later found to cause dangerous genetic mutations in the vaccine's recipients? These question's don't cast doubt on inoculation; rather, they give us cause to look back and learn from our mistakes. In the mid-1950s, trucks cruised down residential streets spraying pesticides while children, unaware that these chemicals might be toxic to more than insects, ran and rode their bikes in tow, huffing the white fog that billowed out of tanks stored in the trucks' beds. Handling mercury with bare skin, and sometimes even tasting it, was a fairly common practice in high school chemistry classrooms. Today, we're learning that plastics can release bisphenol A (BPA), which can cause genetic mutations that affect fetuses, but only the Michael Jordan of self deception would say, "I'll never touch plastic again."

Science can prove that BPA is bad for our collective health, but it can't give anti-vaxxers proof that vaccines don't cause cancer, or whatever. You can't prove a negative. But logical impossibilities are what they demand because the world must contradict itself in order for them to be right. (How rarely, during these conversations, do we think to ask these people why they insist on disagreeing with scientific consensus?) Every day, science and its children, medicine and technology, become more encompassing; and we shouldn't be surprised that there are a lot of people who resist being enveloped in the modern world, convinced as they are that change brings more harm than good. It's natural for anyone to feel this way sometimes, but like the nasty bug that's going around, some people can't keep that feeling to themselves.