What’s the deal with all these anti vaxxers these days? What started this honestly absurd movement and why has it continued to carry support despite various studies refuting the main points of justification for many anti vaxxers? Yeah sure there was that one study by Andrew Wakefield, and later on a movie, that claimed vaccines caused Autism, but so many studies have contradicted those findings and Wakefield has even had his medical license revoked. I mean think about it, how does it make any sense to expose your children to extremely virulent pathogens without any extra protection, effectively taking them back to the Dark Ages? One of my professors, Dr. Cramer, I think said it best when she explained that not vaccinating children was similar to introducing them to a hungry, wild wolf instead of a domesticated golden retriever (see below). If current trends of anti-vaxxing continue, what resurgent disease could we be facing next? The Plague? Polio? Hopefully we can work to reverse this trend and stop these devastating diseases from returning.
So what started this whole anti-vaxxing craze? Take it back to 1998 when Andrew Wakefield published an infamous study that claimed vaccinations directly caused Autism in children. A 2011 British Medical Journal editorial does a fantastic job of pointing out the various flaws and fraudulent conclusions contained within the Wakefield study. First of all, the study was composed of an extremely small sample size of 12 who all came from a subset of children who displayed gastroenterological symptoms (stomach and intestinal issues). I mean come on, 12 kids, like really? You can’t be serious if you say you think 12 isolated cases are sufficient to demonstrate causation. To add on to this already poor scientific design, Wakefield didn’t have any controls in his study, which was not epidemiological in nature. How this study was even published in the first place is beyond me, but the fact that it still holds any weight in the anti-vaccination community is even more ridiculous as there have been a ton of other correctly designed, independent studies that have demonstrated absolutely no link between vaccines and autism. To make matters even worse, it has been found that Wakefield likely had ulterior motives for producing this study, as well as evidence of fraud in the reported results. It was exposed that Wakefield was actively participating in a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the vaccine he used in his study, a clear conflict of interest, which motivated him to alter results and medical histories of the participants of his 1998 study. These clear conflicts of interest are part of what ultimately caused the publisher to retract the study from publication, however the damage was already done at that point as the study had already garnered ample media coverage and invoked a huge vaccination scare throughout the UK and USA.
So just how big of an impact has the anti-vax movement had on the general public? Well, its not quantitatively huge, but it is still statistically significant. A Forbes Magazine article describes how anti-vaxxers have caused the measles, which had previously been eradicated in the US, to become resurgent in 2019. The vaccination scare caused by the Andrew Wakefield study and related media coverage and dissemination of anti-vax propaganda has resulted in more and more parents deciding to no vaccinate their children with MMRV. The CDC recommends that at least 95% of people need to be vaccinated to achieve what is known as herd immunity, which is the level at which the entire population is effectively protected from infection. That’s exactly the reason why I will always vaccinate my children down the road; not only does it protect them as individuals, but it works to protect those around them as well. Unfortunately, the anti-vax movement has continued to distribute misleading and inaccurate information to the general public that has now caused the vaccination rate to fall below that 95% threshold for herd immunity from the measles. At least for me, this is extremely troubling news and hits close to home as my campus just last week notified students that there had been a reported case of the mumps, another infection that is included in the MMR vaccine, in the student body. My question is, how long is insanity going to continue? How much more evidence must we present, how much more suffering must be reported, and how log will it take for us to get back to those optimal vaccination levels that guarantee herd immunity? I fear for the safety of future generations if this dangerous anti-vaxxing trend continues and we continue to regress as a society in terms of the standards we hold for healthcare the level of protection we have from some of the most devastating diseases the world has seen. I urge anyone reading this to consider the scientific facts rather than the pop culture headlines before deciding not to vaccinate themselves or their children.
Keegan's Microbiology Blog 