Nowadays you often hear people say something like, “I had measles and all those other childhood diseases when I was a kid. They don’t do any real harm and aren’t those vaccines even more dangerous. Besides, I just don’t trust those drug companies.”
Let’s take those assertions, because that’s what they are, assertions without any supporting evidence, one at a time. Measles, mumps and rubella, also known as German measles, are considered childhood diseases only because they are so infectious and widespread that nearly everyone is exposed and infected at a young age. Still, if you manage to avoid exposure as a child you can catch any of them as an adult. Right now here in Philadelphia there is an outbreak of mumps amongst the 18-21 year old students at Temple University.
As far as childhood diseases causing no real harm, well I can tell you personally that’s a load of bleep. I am practically deaf in my right ear thanks to the mumps I had as a child but compared to many people I was actually lucky. You see statistically about 1 out of every 500 people who contract measles will die due to complications, that’s about 73,000 people worldwide every year. Mumps are less deadly; only one person in 10,000 will die, but still is it worth running the risk if you don’t have to?
That’s because there is absolutely no reason to take the risk. The MMR vaccine (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) is so effective, greater than 95%, that if an entire population gets vaccinated the three diseases simply cannot take hold and spread. Another few statistics will illustrate how true that is. Before the first measles vaccine vaccine was introduced in 1963 the number of US citizens who contacted the disease each year was in the hundreds of thousands! That means more then a thousand dying each year! After the MMR vaccine was introduced that number quickly dropped to only 66 reported cases in 2005 with no reported deaths at all.
So why are we still talking about this? Why do I even have to write a blog post describing the dangers of measles, mumps and rubella? Aren’t people intelligent enough to realize the threat of these diseases and how easy it is to protect themselves with a simple vaccine? You have to wonder why any sensible person would refuse to be vaccinated, why they would choose to risk their children’s health by refusing to have them vaccinated.
Recently of course there has been a large increase in the number of people who oppose vaccination because of misinformation and all too often downright lies. Much of this propaganda campaign began back in 1998 when a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in which he linked the MMR vaccine to both Colitis and Autism in children. Even though there was criticism from other researchers almost immediately the article was widely discussed in the media and the seeds planted for what would become a global conspiracy theory.
In fact the paper was worse then simply bad science. An investigative journalist named Brian Deer soon uncovered evidence that Wakefield had received over £400,000 from several attorneys who were actively suing the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine and that several of the cases mentioned in the paper were clients of those attorneys. Not only that but Wakefield himself was trying to patent a rival vaccine to MMR.
So it’s hardly surprising that Wakefield was later found to have manipulated his patient’s data committing what has been called “perhaps the most damaging medical hoax in the last 100 years.” The original paper has been completely withdrawn by the journal that published it and Wakefield’s license to practice medicine in the UK has been revoked.
That’s all just a big conspiracy; say those people who see conspiracies everywhere. The big drug companies are suppressing the truth in order to preserve their big profits! (Actually drug companies don’t make much money off of vaccines that people only take once. The vast majority of drug profits come from people with chronic conditions like high cholesterol who have to take a pill every day for the rest of their lives.)
In addition there are those people whose children are autistic and who feel the very human need to find something, or someone to blame. If your child is ill and you don’t know why, the causes of autism are still largely unknown; it’s easy to accuse people who appear to be better off than you are.
All of which has led to a growing number of parents, often well-educated and genuinely concerned about their children, deciding that the danger of measles is less than the risk of the vaccines. It’s all a position driven by fear and once fear enters an argument logic and evidence are powerless to fight against it.
And so we now have outbreaks of an easily preventable disease in nearly all developed countries. Real children are becoming sick by a real disease in order to protect them from an imagined danger. In the long run enough people will get sick, and some people will die, so that we become reminded of the very real threat of diseases like measles. When that happens vaccine rates will go back up, but in the meantime, what a waste of human life!