Stop writing patronizing articles debasing people’s choices and clouding the already incredibly complicated mix of science, money and fear. Or, make every vaccine in single doses so that parents can choose the ones that fit best for them. And then use real facts and education so they may actually make the decisions that are best for their family’s particular health, social, economical and religious lives.
But I’ll settle for less asshole commentary first.
Perhaps it’s because of the current barely contained panic with H1N1, or maybe just because sheer coincidence, but I feel like there have been more articles published recently attacking people who choose not to vaccinate. And I use the word attack because the slant of these articles is literally about idiots like myself who are not only woefully (scientifically) uneducated, but worse, wantonly wield the sword of death by choosing not to take one for the team (literally) and vaccinate for the betterment and safety of the whole. And you think I’m being hyperbolic, but read this piece of crap from Slate and tell me I’m not supposed to think just that. I’ve also in the last week read a blurb in the October 12 edition of the New Yorker, and a loverly story about those who think vaccines cause autism in the November issue of Wired Magazine.
It is increasingly frustrating to me, after 7 years of researching vaccines, that a respectful and two-sided discourse can’t seem to be had in the media about vaccines. One because I think the goal of separating out vaccines for personal choice is the best case scenario for everyone (and it won’t happen until public opinion forces the money lost to unused vaccines from being the reason doctors and health departments often refuse to separate them), and two because I do obviously think the vast majority of vaccines are unnecessary or ill-timed, and if more people had the facts, it would take away the fear that drives most parental decision-making.
Last week Lo had a pretty high fever. And I’m not even going to pretend that for one brief moment when I was driving down the highway to go get her, I didn’t imagine the what-if of H1N1 and death. I’m not above panic just because I spout unpopular views on this stuff. But in the end, the truth is, and I really fuggin mean this, if either of my children died because of a disease for which you can get a vax, I would feel no more guilt than if they died of something for which you CAN’T. Because I have done enough research and I simply – philosophically – think the overwhelming levels of vaccination administered currently are going to eventually be seen as a phenomenally historic mistake.
I have accepted the singularly important fact that it is impossible to try to stop everything that could kill you, nor is it even always the better choice for the whole team.
I really believe that. There are just too many competing variables routinely unacknowledged that complicate the issue. Efficacy, ingredients, epidemiological niches, hell – even the bypassing of the first step of the normal immune defense (in that almost all vaccines are injected intramuscularly straight to the circulatory system, which oddly enough, is not how one usually contracts a respiratory illness). That. Is. Not. Natural. And yes, when it comes to something this scientifically complex, that is a big deal to me. Because the science behind it all is the attempt to manipulate the natural consequences within the environments of both my body and the world I live in. And if I look at the big, long-term picture, and really do consider the whole team, I don’t think it is working nearly as well as ‘they’ need you to believe.
The Wired article was in defense of Paul Offit, who whether fairly or not, has taken the brunt for the vax side. I’ll admit it was interesting to see him painted as the person he is, rather than the asshole figurehead I and other people have called him. But it didn’t stop me from shaking my head at the fear-mongering and condescension used. One quote says “I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well children have started to die.”
Sigh. Please google RotaShield + intussusception. I don’t think the guy is a monster. But I do think he’s an arrogant, callous, PR failure.
There was a sidebar in the Wired article called ‘How to Win an Argument About Vaccines‘ that literally made me laugh. It was so ridiculously patronizing, and well.. lame.. I was stunned. In the first Myth, this line
(Thimerosal isn’t gone from all vaccines — it’s still present in some influenza formulations. But none of the vaccines routinely required for school admission contains thimerosal as a preservative.)1
is for whatever reason convenient or otherwise, missing from the printed magazine. Does it negate the myth that vaccines can cause autism (an idea that I, even as an autie mom, don’t in the least believe)? No. But it was a fact that was wrongly printed about something that is super important to the majority of people worried about vaccines. Mercury was enough of a concern that they had to take it out, obviously (though even that is another misleading fact listed – that the thimerosal-filled vaccines were just voila! off the shelves in 2001. They were actually on the shelves for a year or two after that while suppliers used up their stores, but I digress. )
Fact is, I have an issue with all of their ‘myths’, or at least their summations of public opinions within each. Not because I’m defensive about what they’re trying to assume I think as a non-vaxer, but because they’re just… dumb. I mean number five is that there is no dividing opinion within scientists. Except for those few dissenters, but they don’t count.
Mmm.. what?
Whatever. Maybe Wired had to fill some space on the page and made the poor sidebar fool find another ‘myth’ an hour before sending to press. Who cares. The point is that it’s patronizing to the group they are discussing (in this case those that believe that vaccines can cause autism, in other articles those who don’t vaccinate period) despite that the following fact printed in Wired is actually true:
…counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth.
So at the very least it should be acknowledged that perhaps the overarchcing implication that the non-vaccinating demographic are miseducated sheeple, is actually… wait for it… wrong. That perhaps there could be some people who are at the simplest level making choices that other people just don’t like.
Look. Obviously I’m just as fired up as the people writing the articles. But that’s less because I’m defensive about my views, but more that I feel these articles are stupidly unbalanced and pejorative. To the point where, coupled with the current flu season/H1N1 awareness, it’s beginning to feel a little uncomfortably like a witchhunt to me, and I’ve never encountered that before. There’s a sweet, sweet little girl in Jack’s class who has spina bifida, and she has missed 6 weeks of school because her parents are afraid of H1n1. I was told she might choose to stay home through the whole season because of those who are unvaccinated that might infect her. Was that directed at me? I have no idea. But I don’t think it’s fair for myriad of reasons if it was.
I want those I respect (and those who don’t know me in the least) to know that I am actually aware of herd immunity and what would happen if everyone stopped vaccinating. That I don’t make these decisions lightly, and that I really wish it didn’t appear to be something that was done selfishly or without regard to any possible consequences. It’s a paradigm shift for a lot of people, and I get that. And I know there are those who fit the picture these articles are aimed at, but I’m not it. And neither are a lot of people I know who feel the same way I do.
And because this is already a hellaciously long post, I’ll go ahead and copy here the response I quickly and furiously wrote after reading that Slate article. Because I can’t let a vax post end without some some attempt to counter the propaganda, and because at its basest level, at least the two opinions are honest that every parent wants what’s best for their own children.
Thanks to those who made it this far. 
Interesting. The author uses one child in a day care as the smoking gun for her son’s precarious death, and yet for all her refutation that ‘current public opinion about childhood vaccinations sometimes seems to be influenced less by science and more by Jenny McCarthy’, she herself fails to either seriously research or at the very least objectively acknowledge that statistically the vast majority of adults are not up-to-date on their own vaccine schedules. People look toward children as the carrier monkeys of all illness, but you are just as likely to catch a disease from the 40-year-old woman hacking away in the grocery store as you are from little Johnny on the bus.
The VariVax vaccine has long been cited by medical journals as having one of the lowest efficacy rates, making going to school at all akin to attending a ‘pox party’; cursory searches will find many stories documenting outbreaks among vaccinated populations. The rise of shingles, a nervous system-attacking pleasant little thing, is directly correlated to the mass vaccination of VariVax, which is unable to provide, ironically, the lifelong immunity conferred from the wild varicella virus. So does that mean in 70 years I can write the same article about her vaccinated child, because her herd immunity eradicated the necessary protection my daughter is missing when she gets shingles as an elderly person?
She mentions that the child who died of Hib was an infant not old enough for that vaccine, but was in fact one of three in a family that don’t vaccinate… But vax status is actually irrelevant here, b/c the child was too young regardless of the family’s opinion on immunizations. So if anything, based on her own hysterical logic, she proved that Hib doesn’t have to be feared if the other four children – one of whom was immuno-deficient – DIDN’T die (despite that three of them actually were unvaccinated). And really, if she wants to take her fear mongering to the next level, she should research epidemiological niches, and the serotype replacement of the other 5 Haemophilus influenza strains that replaced the unnatural decline of the b strain. True story.
It’s sad for this family that they have to try and overcome leukemia. Without a doubt. But pretending this article is anything other than a misleading, poorly-researched witch hunt, is not helping anyone. We’re all parents trying to do what’s best for our children, and you don’t worry or love your child any less if they DON’T have cancer. This was the Limbaugh of vax articles, and if she truly believes it’s as righteously and scientifically simple as she proclaims (and this wasn’t actually somehow an indirect tie to Paul Offit, of multiple vaccine patent and money-making fame) then she needs to put her child in a bubble. And live there with him.
