Another piece of the puzzle. Consider Marin County, one of the richest areas of the country and the center of a whooping cough epidemic in 2013. This population isn’t stupid and it isn’t uneducated. In fact, it’s fairly successful on the whole. So what gives?
I think it’s a case of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. These college educated parents hear about Vax and anti-Vax positions and split the difference, thinking that their baby might be a little young to handle a multi-purpose vaccination. Maybe we’ll wait 6 months, which might turn out to be a year or never.
The intuition is sound, but they haven’t grasped that when non-expert opinion collides with broad scientific consensus, the experts win. But in a media environment saturated with false equivalences and an education system that stresses that all opinions are valid, it takes an act of will to do the proper thing and dismiss certain points of view. Not because you don’t identify with them. But because it’s easy to create plausibly sounding but unsubstantiated arguments. Sometimes you might even want to give additional weight to positions that run against some of your intuitions but have some evidence behind them.
Anti-vaxxers try to create a false dichotomy, with doctors, pharmaceutical employees, and anyone else in the “medical establishment” on one side, and ordinary people on the other, and then suggest that it’s us against them, as though doctors and pharmacists don’t have children, and don’t choose to vaccinate them. The children of doctors, nurses, people with Ph.Ds in fields like virology and pharmacology, and people who work for pharmaceutical companies all vaccinate their children. If their were anything wrong with vaccines, and any secret knowledge that people in the healthcare industry had, children of doctors and pharmaceutical company CEOs wouldn’t be vaccinated; that isn’t the case.
The truth is they are us; doctors care about patients, and pharmaceutical researchers want to develop effective treatments. They want to make money as well, but they don’t want to hurt people. If you look at the few times an accident at a drug factory has caused harm, and what the response has been (see “the Cutter incident,” or the Sabin vaccine, or the response of the parent company that makes Tylenol to the poisoning in Chicago in the 1980s that was not even a manufacturing problem), it’s obvious that they don’t want to hurt people. Hurting people is bad business, but still, there are easier ways to make money than producing drugs, even if you stumble on the next Viagra. It’s possible to want to make a good living, and help people at the same time.
I have several doctors, and a pharmacological researcher in my family, and another about to get a Ph.D in a field that will probably end her up doing work looking for better and better HIV drugs. Both my doctor-cousins have children, and all the children are fully vaccinated. I can’t swear that doctors who are more distant family members have fully vaccinated children, but I’d but money on it.
My Mother-in-Law is in her 80’s and was an elementary school teacher. We talked about this yesterday and she’s horrified. She saw what polio and smallpox did to children first hand. Back in her day, people used to have measles parties when they deliberately exposed their children to measles and chickenpox. Most of those kids were fine, but some weren’t.
She told me about a little girl in her class who was smart and fun and happy and got chickenpox and ended up mostly blind and brain damaged.
There were also 2 kids that she knew of that died from the measles.
Me? I happily roll up my sleeve every year to get my flu shot. I keep my pre-exposure rabies shots up to date and I pay for it myself because our insurance doesn’t cover it. Hell, my plague shots are up to date and I doubt I’ll ever leave the country again.
My husband remembers standing in a long line with his mother at the health department for and smallpox vaccinations. Everyone back then wanted to protect their children from the horrible savageness that could happen if they were exposed to something bad.
I really don’t understand why anti-vaxers would expose their children to easily avoided dangers. I’ll bet they use car seats and the straps on high chairs all the time.
They do have a herd mentality. -.-
Don’t be cowed by nay-sayers!
Neigh-sayers.
Dunning-Kruger effect - the unskilled are unable to realize how inept they are. Another component is that the skilled may believe others are just as good as they are and thus feel less competent/confident than they deserve to feel.
Don’t not equate with educated with smart.
Some of the dumbest people (in a real world sense) I have ever met have had excellent if not superior educations.
These people, because they are experts in underwater basket weaving or what ever think they are experts in everything.
They are ripe for the picking by anti-vaxers or Scientology or what ever new age fad that comes along.
In the immortal words of Alessan,
It’s also that people just don’t know how bad these diseases are. I actually had one person try to argue that the measles isn’t so bad, because of the episode where all the Brady kids got it, and they weren’t all that sick, and then they all got better. It was a goddam TV show.
Anyway, something a lot of people aren’t aware of is post-measles encephalomyelitis. It’s a terrible and relentless disintegretory disorder that is caused by the measles, and can have an onset of anywhere from six weeks to six years. When there was no vaccine, and measles was common, while the post-measles syndrome happens only to a small percentage of children who recover from measles, so it wasn’t until measles became unusual, that the connection became apparent. The syndrome ends in death, and it’s a terrible death. Children lose neural function-- they can’t walk, sit up, feed themselves, talk, some go deaf or blind, then they die of respiratory failure.
These parents now who think their kids are just going to have a rash and a fever, and be a little uncomfortable for a few days may be in for a shock when their child is the one who gets encephalomyelitis three years later.
Don’t get me started on polio.
My father had a sister who died of one of the diseases that there is a vaccine for now. I’m not sure which one-- mumps or measles, probably. She was very little. You can’t bet my father made sure my vaccines were up-to-date. If he hadn’t, though, the fact that my mother suffered through bad cases of both mumps and measles, and got better, but was miserable the whole time, would have assured that my brother and I were fully vaccinated.
And my son is as well.
My great-grandmother has German measles while pregnant. She bore twins, one a fine healthy looking boy, and the other, a tiny wrinkled little red skinned thing. Surprise, the healthy boy died the next day, for no discernible reason, and the little twin grew up to be my great-uncle George.
Who knew what might have been wrong inside of his twin? Damned measles could be a killer.
Folks that don’t vaccinate their kids are setting themselves up for heartbreak.
I know you aren’t asking for an answer, but Rubella can cause the organs of the endocrine system not to develop, and that could be why the baby died. He may have looked healthy because the twins may have had something called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, and his brother kept him healthy in the womb.
I knew a guy at Gallaudet who was Deaf, but that was all that was wrong with him-- his vision and intellect were fine, and he was very athletic and healthy. He had a stillborn twin. His mother also had had Rubella while pregnant, less than a year before the vaccine was developed.
Thank you for this information. I know that after more than a century there’s no way to tell what went wrong(no autopsy of course) but this is very interesting. Since George was said to be so small, might that twin-to-twin transfusion thing have been stunting him? He did grow up to be full sized and healthy though. I may print this all off and show it to my mom, a retired RN. All of my great-grandmother’s children are now gone, but the surviving twin’s son, my mother’s cousin, is still with us. My grandmother died in 2012, the last of the siblings. Good genes there, anyway, she was less than a month from her 108th birthday.
Yes, TTT will cause one twin to be very small, and it may take a long time to catch up, if it survives. But twins who have this do survive.
Also, the other baby may have looked healthy, but he could have been deaf and autistic. The organs of the endocrine system not developing is a rare effect of Rubella compared to deafness and blindness, but it happens. I knew someone who had congenital Rubella and needed insulin, Synthroid, HGH, and digestive enzymes every day. She was actually lucky-- she first got HGH before it was synthesized, and it came from grinding up the pituitary glands of cadavers. Some people got Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from that. Actually, I knew her when she was young-- she may not take HGH anymore, but she still would take the others.
hides
I had rubella in high school. I wish all the anti-vaxers could feel the way I did that week for just a few hours. They would rethink their choices-
In all my years, no illness has ever made me feel so miserable and closer to death than measles did that week. People who think it’s a mild disease are nuts.
Here’s a nice tableof vaccine-preventable diseases, the stats on side effects for the diease, and the stats on side effects for the vaccines. (It doesn’t include chicken pox because that’s not on the Irish vaccination schedule, but still.)
Rubella and measles are two different things. Rubella is also called German measles.
The actress Gene Tierney (Laura) caught Rubella from an infected fan who broke quarantine to see her perform live, and then went backstage to meet her. Tierney was pregnant, and her daughter ended up deaf, blind, and mentally retarded. Tierney found out how she was exposed to Rubella when she ran into the fan again, who told her the story of how she broke quarantine because she wanted so much to see her, and it was one of the most thrilling nights of her life.
If the story sounds familiar, it’s because Agatha Christie borrowed it as a motive for murder in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Tierney did not murder the fan in real life, but I’ll bet she would have gotten a very light sentence if she had.
Rubella isn’t very serious in older children and adults-- some people don’t even know they have it-- but it’s devastating for fetuses. Gallaudet University built two new dormitories in anticipation of increased enrollment after the Rubella epidemic of 1965-66.
Is Jenny still trying to pretend she was never anti-vaxx? Or did she give that up?