Anti-Vaccine Crowd Helping Create Highly Infectious Measles Outbreak
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Public health officials may have been premature three years ago in declaring that measles was completely eliminated in America. New outbreaks of the highly infectious disease are once again cropping up in cities across the country. It would be a big mistake, epidemiologists warn, not to take this extremely seriously.
In a feat that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, the anti-vaccine movement has managed to breathe life into nearly vanquished childhood diseases. These propagandists helped create the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years in Washington State.
The measles outbreaks have caused plenty of outrage aimed at Jenny McCarthy and the crowd of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. Writing in the Daily Beast, a pediatrician using the pseudonym Russell Saunders calls it “sheer lunacy”: “Just over a dozen years ago this illness was considered eliminated in our country,” he writes, “and this year people are being hospitalized for it. All due to the hysteria about a safe, effective vaccine. All based on nothing.”
The media has been complicit in spreading some of anti-vaccine misinformation. Sometimes it comes straight from the media itself, such as the credulous, anti-science, anti-vax CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Other times it comes from talk shows, magazines, or even airline advertisements that provide a platform for anti-vax celebrity doctors such as Jay Gordon (who gained fame as Jenny McCarthy’s son’s doctor) and “Dr. Bob” Sears, who has published his own “alternative” vaccine schedule in a book filled with anti-vaccine nonsense. These characters continue to claim, at every chance they get, that vaccines cause autism (as Gordon has said, repeatedly), or that they cause other harms, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They use their medical degrees and their faux concern “for the children” to frighten parents into keeping their kids unvaccinated.
But for the most part, the outbreaks are also being treated as a cautionary tale – an opportunity to chide anti-vaxxers while reminding parents to make sure that their children are up-to-date on their shots, as KJ Dell’Antonia does at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog:
This outbreak could serve as a reminder that we vaccinate our children, and ourselves, for our own protection and for the protection of our community. A spokesperson for New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center said that the hospital is notifying 600 people who might have been exposed there (in what it calls “probably an excess of caution”). If the majority of those 600 people were not vaccinated, The Times could soon be running a very different article on its front page. Fortunately, statistics suggest that most of those 600 people will have been vaccinated against measles, and 95 percent of them will be immune as a result. That’s lucky for us all, including those who have made a different choice for their children.
It’s important for the health care community to speak up about these dangerous propagandists. Even more importantly, politicians, preachers, and other leaders need to call these folks out, and show them for what they are; a bizarre, fringe religion who’s goal appears to be the spread of infectious diseases like measles. The voices of the irrational must be drowned out by the voices of the rational. Then and only then can we can reverse the damage these nutters have done to public health.
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How can you convince people who can’t get or afford health insurance yet are against national health insurance? How can you convince people climate change is happening, present the mountains of evidence of glacier melt and sea levels rising and drought and 97% of scientists believing in it, yet the deniers deny it because it was snowing in Toronto in January.
How can you convince someone who’s generation saw the eradication of polio and other deadly diseases because of vaccinations, yet still refuse to vaccinate their children because a Kevin Trudeau type charlatan convinced them it’s “dangerous.”
The truth is we can’t convince my friends. These people are idiots.
I like measles. Measles got me 3 weeks off of school as a kid.
I understand people not wanting to admit that they are not as knowledgeable as others. Thus, Jenny McCarthy and others need to find something that they can say to show that actually they ARE as knowledgeable. But it’s time for them to shut up and let the smarter people, those who observe the actualities around them and believe in the education that has trained those who developed the vaccines, have their voices heard! It is totally indefensible that diseases whose demise was just around the corner, have now reemerged in force! Shame on them (the anti-vaccine activists)!