Best Shot – Protecting ourselves from the anti-vaccine movement
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
My daughter - 18 months - has had her basic vaccinations, but is late for her MMR due to my wife's concerns.
I find it incredibly difficult; for every rational argument, there's an irrational "What about X" counterargument.
The fact that every rational explanation is greeted with another absurdity reveals the sad truth: she -and the other anti-vaccine people I've met - aren't interested in the truth, only following their faith that all vaccines are bad. We're based in Poland, and there's a huge amount of plausible-looking anti-vaccine information out there.
Most unhelpfully, a child in our social circle recently had to be hospitalised after a one-in-a-million allergic reaction to their MMR.
I'm close to breaking point; my marriage and life is otherwise healthy, but I can't idly stand by and leave my daughter and wider society vulnerable. God knows what'll happen when I she gets vaccinated behind her mother's back; I don't hold out much hope.
Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Has anyone ever successfully convinced a anti-vaccine spouse? I'm at my wit's end.
She is now pretty much caught up on her vaccinations.
I don't know if I would make the same decision now, given apparently lower herd immunization rates, I might argue more vociferously.
It was easy to pick vaccines to reject, e.g., Gardasil (protects against only 2 of 4 major strains, covering ~%40 of cases, was not being given to boys, so seemed like corporate welfare for sure and could give a false sense of security), or the flu, which is useful for those at risk, less so for the strong and healthy, and by conceding on one or two I was able to get some of the more important ones.
Nowadays, now that I know the term catastrophic thinking, I might start the conversation in a general and helpful way, talking not about vaccines at all, but about how my wife reacts very strongly to bad news - or potential bad news. Over time, talk about this as a couple. With luck, her reactions will mitigate. If and when they do, discuss vaccination.
Good luck, my friend, it is a tough issue, an emotional one, and appeals to facts are not your friends (because of the emotionality of the issue - the underlying emotions must be acknowledged first).
Understanding Febrile Seizures “Febrile” means “relating to a fever.” In some children, having a fever—even fever that comes with typical childhood illnesses like ear infections or the common cold—can bring on a seizure. Measles was a common cause of febrile seizures in the United States before the disease became rare due to the success of the vaccination program. During a febrile seizure, a child often has spasms or jerking movements and may lose consciousness. Febrile seizures usually last only a minute or two. They are most common with fevers that get up to 102°F (38.9°C) or higher, but can also occur at lower temperatures or when a high fever is going down. Febrile seizures often result in a visit to an emergency room for the child and can be very frightening for parents and caregivers. However, most children who have febrile seizures recover quickly and have no lasting effects.
Which implies to me that the problem is MMR can cause a fever, and fevers can result in febrile seizures.
You should think really hard before trading off this risk for the increased risk of measles and mumps. Rubella I'm not so sure about (I think the #1 reason for that is to protect pregnant women).
In the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc were very common. Everyone knew people who had them, knew how awful they were, and vaccines were a clear way of solving this imminent and pressing issue.
I'm 30, and I've never had any of those. I've never even seen a case of measles in anyone I know. I'm obviously still going to vaccinate my children, but the benefit is not immediately obvious. They are very unlikely to get measles no matter what I do.
A few weeks after the news of an outbreak came around, a vaccine was available in Finland.
I refused the vaccine under the premise that I didn't believe it had been properly tested. People called me a nut, claiming I was "anti-vaccine" and some kind of right wing wacko and that Bush was the devil, etc.
A couple years later, it turned out the vaccine gave a bunch of Finnish kids narcolepsy, but by this point nobody was focused on pig SARS and my "See? I told you so!" fell on deaf ears.
I think vaccine-hesitance is too readily labeled as anti-vaccine, and there is a confirmation bias where it is easy to point out that someone is sick with an XYZ infection but it is difficult to show correlation between a vaccination that occurred 5 years ago and some symptoms that end up appearing as a result of that vaccination.
Are you willing to potentially (under non-trivial odds) sacrifice your child's health in some serious, potentially life-altering way, in order that the whole community will be helped in some amorphous fashion?
Whether pro- or anti-vaccination, that's really the question.
You can put emphasis more heavily on the first or the second part as your biases and experiences warrant, but that's still the question.
All medical interventions have a risk, vaccinations included. That is, there is a risk that the intervention itself will cause some harm.
But all medical interventions also have a risk of doing nothing. It's when the risk of the intervention is less than the risk of doing nothing that we say it's best to do the intervention. As humans, we irrationally place greater emphasis on risks from doing something over the risks from doing nothing. To the point that some who read your point won't even notice the risk on the other side. But this is irrational, and if we want to evaluate what courses of action are most likely to yield good health, we must always consider the risk of doing nothing as well.
What's the emoticon for <fistbite>?
Make eradication a priority rather than endless vaccination programs that look like corporate welfare. I know this is actually very very hard.
Stop telling people the mercury really isn't a problem and just quit putting it in there as a preservative. This OTOH is not hard. I'm not going to debate weather the mercury passes through, just pointing out that we don't even need to have the discussion. I know cost is supposed to be a factor, but when my employer is having someone come to give flu shots "for free" I don't think the cost difference is too much for a first world country. Eliminate the concern rather than worry about convincing people.
That's half the problem!
Mercury hasn't been in vaccines, and the confused compound hasn't been in vaccines for at least a decade:
This is wrong. Mercury was only ever present (intentionally, at least) in vaccines as part of thiomersol (a preservative).
> The vaccines have mercury or aluminum or other irritants for the designed purpose of provoking a strong immune response.
Aluminum is used as an adjuvant. Mercury containing compounds are not.
If you can cite a credible source to the contrary, I'd be much obliged.
Further, there are people who can't get vaccinated for a variety of reasons (the CDC has a list here for various vaccines: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/should-not-vacc.htm). Those are the people that we need the herd immunity for.
The problem here isn't vaccines, it's the human immune system, which is imperfect. People who've had the chicken pox as a child can and do get it later in life. Vaccines only work by manipulating the existing machinery of the immune system, and so can only do so much. They're not meant to be some kind of magical potion that confers perfect immunity.
Herd immunity is a key part, however, of how vaccines keep POPULATIONS healthy. By giving a large number of individuals (say, 95%) a significantly reduced chance of catching a communicable disease, the entire population is at less risk of a disease outbreak because it's harder for the infection to spread. This is why polio, measles, mumps, etc. have been exceedingly rare in the US in the later half of the 20th century - because large numbers of people were more resistant to catching the diseases and therefore much less likely to spread the disease to others.
> Make eradication a priority rather than endless vaccination programs that look like corporate welfare. I know this is actually very very hard.
Yes. It's been done once with a human disease, and that was through a massive, worldwide vaccination campaign. What other means do you suggest we employ to eradicate a disease? Massive quarantines? Airstrikes on areas with outbreaks?