Medical superstition has consequences

There’s really nothing quite so wonderful as living in a community that’s become a regional hot spot for pertussis because hundreds and hundreds of assholes refuse to immunize their children. We’ve had 80 reported cases since July. Fantastic.

Juneau has endured similar fake controversies in recent years, and as expected, the objections to sound public health measures aren’t even remotely grounded in fact; the particular arguments against the pertussis vaccine have little to do with the typically bogus anxieties about thimerosol and autism, but instead focus on a pile of anecdotes from the 1970s and 1980s, when the “whole cell” pertussis vaccine was alleged to be responsible for seizures and brain damage. Despite the lack of empirical evidence supporting a link between the DTP vaccination and adverse, and despite the fact that newer “acellular” vaccines (DTaP) have replaced DTP (and have, in any case, proven equally safe and effective as the previous generation of drugs), anti-vaccination zealots continue to argue that pertussis vaccinations are unnecessary and pose dangers to children that physicians and pharmaceutical companies don’t want parents to know about for some reason. I’d post a list of conditions that these people believe are routinely caused by pertussis vaccines, but it would be easier just to type the word “everything” and run the risk of just slightly overstating the matter. (Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually believe “Shaken Baby Syndrome” is sometimes caused by vaccines.)

Barbara Loe Fisher, of the mis-named National Vaccine Information Center, is probably the most well-known American proponent of all this silliness. She’s got a blog these days, wherein she documents the vast conspiracy, warning about the grave threat to personal liberty that public health represents, and occasionally giving props along the way to investigative wizards like those at Pat Robertson’s CBN, who I suppose can be counted on to raise the oldest anti-vaccination arguments of all (e.g., God hates it).

Until recently, I’d have argued that the rhetoric of the anti-vaccination movement resembles that of the climate change deniers or those who sow doubt about the veracity of the moon landing. But the more I read about these folks, the more their work reminds me of some of the fraudulent arguments raised by anti-choicers who insist that abortions pose unique physical and psychological perils to women. Obviously the policy landscape is different, but the style of the argument — e.g., the reliance on personal anecdote, the disregard for data that hasn’t been contorted painfully, the demonization of medical practitioners, the insistence that all of this is being done to protect innocent life — seems oddly familiar.

…Jeebus, these folks even have an online memorial to the “victims of immunization”… The mind, to coin a phrase, boggles.