Dummheit 3

Stephanie Messenger is an Australian author of self-published educational books for children, such as Don’t Bully Billy and Sarah Visits a Naturopath. In 2012, she published a book that, according to promotional materials, “takes children on a journey to learn about the ineffectiveness of vaccinations and to know they don’t have to be scared of childhood illnesses, like measles and chicken pox.” The blurb on the back of the book talks about how nowadays we’re bombarded with messages urging us to fear diseases, from people who have “vested interests” in selling “some potion or vaccine.”

 

Messenger called the book Melanie’s Marvelous Measles. Perhaps she drew inspiration from the beloved British children’s author Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine. Which would be ironic, given Dahl’s own feelings about measles, which he wrote about in 1986.

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling alright?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her.

In 1962, when the measles took Olivia’s life, there was no vaccine. Practically everyone caught the measles at some point in childhood. Most recovered without any lasting damage, but it killed around a hundred children in the United Kingdom and more than four hundred in America every year, and put tens of thousands more in the hospital, leaving some blind or brain-damaged. When a vaccine was licensed in the United States a year later, in 1963, the number of people who caught measles plummeted by 98 percent. “In my opinion,” Dahl concluded, “parents who now refuse to have their children immunized are putting the lives of those children at risk.”...

The falling vaccination rates prompted outbreaks of the diseases that the vaccine prevents—particularly, since it’s so highly contagious, measles. The first outbreak was in Dublin in 2000, where vaccination rates were already lower than in the United Kingdom. Almost sixteen hundred cases of measles were reported. More than a hundred children were admitted to hospital with serious complications, and three died. A thirteen-year-old boy died in England in 2006, becoming the first person to die of measles in England since 1994. In 2008, measles was declared endemic in the United Kingdom for the first time in fourteen years. In 2012 there were more than two thousand cases of measles in England and Wales—mostly affecting children and teenagers whose parents had declined the MMR vaccine years earlier. In 2013, another outbreak in Wales infected more than a thousand people, hospitalizing eighty-eight, and killing a twenty-five-year-old man...

That all looks pretty bad, I think it’s fair to say, but we shouldn’t necessarily dismiss the hypothesis that MMR somehow causes autism on the basis of Wakefield’s behavior alone. Since his paper was published, dozens of independent, large, well-conducted studies, involving hundreds of thousands of children across several continents, have found no association whatsoever between the MMR vaccine and autism. As Paul Offit, a pediatrician and immunologist, has pointed out, we still don’t know for sure exactly what causes autism, but by now we can say with considerable certainty that vaccines can be crossed off the list of suspects...

In 1973, a British doctor called John Wilson gave a presentation at an academic conference in which he claimed that the pertussis component of DPT was causing seizures and brain damage in infants. The research was based on a small number of children, and it has since emerged that many of the children were misdiagnosed, and some hadn’t even received the DPT vaccine. Regardless, Wilson took his findings to the media, appearing on prime-time television in a program that contained harrowing images of sick children and claimed that a hundred British children suffered brain damage every year as a result of the DPT vaccine. Uptake of the DPT vaccine fell from around 80 percent at the beginning of the decade to just 31 percent by 1978. This was followed by a pertussis epidemic during 1978 and ’79, in which a hundred thousand cases of whooping cough were reported in England and Wales. It’s estimated that around six hundred children died in the outbreak.

Despite flaws in Wilson’s study, as well as a growing number of studies that found no evidence of the alleged link between DPT and brain damage, by the early eighties the fear had spread to America...

So the current epidemic of fear over the MMR vaccine is in many ways simply an extension of the vaccine anxiety that blossomed in the 1970s. But it didn’t start there. In fact, people have been worried about the safety of vaccines—and the motives of the people who make and sell them—since the discovery of the very first vaccine...

By 1820, millions of people had been vaccinated in Britain, Europe, and the United States, and the number of people dying from smallpox was cut in half.

Not everyone was impressed. There immediately arose some sporadic opposition to the vaccine. Objections were occasionally raised on religious grounds—to vaccinate oneself, some argued, was to question God’s divine plan. Others objected for economic reasons, or simply out of disgust at a vaccine derived from sick cows, coupled with distrust of the doctors who administered them. By 1800, Jenner was moved to defend his vaccine from detractors, writing “the feeble efforts of a few individuals to depreciate the new practice are sinking fast into contempt.” His optimism was misplaced...

So vaccine anxiety was a side effect of the very first vaccine, and the symptoms have never quite cleared up. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the long-standing unease about vaccines is how little the arguments have changed over the centuries. Jenner’s critics created elaborate cartoons depicting doctors as unfeeling monsters, intent on sacrificing innocent, helpless children. Twenty-first-century anti-vaccinationists write blog posts with titles like “Doctors want power to kill disabled babies.” Nineteenth-century activists claimed that the smallpox vaccine contained “poison of adders, the blood, entrails, and excretion of bats, toads and suckling whelps” and fought for their right to remain “pure and unpolluted.” The modern-day “green our vaccines” movement doesn’t go so far as to say vaccines contain entrails, but they still misconstrue vaccines as containing “toxins” including antifreeze, insect repellent, and spermicide. And, as Paul Offit has pointed out, the current concerns about MMR somehow causing autism are about as plausible, biologically speaking, as the claim, widely reported in the early 1800s, that the smallpox vaccine caused recipients to sprout horns, run about on all fours, and low and squint like cows.

And throughout it all, there have been theories alleging a vast international conspiracy to trump up the dangers of the diseases that vaccines, to hide the truth about vaccine side effects, and to ensure profits for Big Pharma and the government...

Thanks to a small but vocal minority of dedicated anti-vaccinists, the Internet is rife with conspiracy-laced misinformation urging us not to trust vaccines. Making matters worse, the media often portrays the controversy with a false sense of balance. Most parents have heard the claims about autism and vaccines, and, according to a recent study, merely reading anti-vaccine conspiracy theories can reduce parents’ willingness to have their children vaccinated.

The science is clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. But conspiracy theories erode our trust in science, allowing controversy to linger long after the questions have been settled.

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/29/what_the_hells_wrong_with_us_autism_vaccines_and_why_some_people_believe_jenny_mccarthy_over_every_doctor/