The arguments denouncing those who oppose giving
their kids Measles vaccine continues with a
powerful article in The Nation by Annie Sparrow,
who propounds administering mandatory measles
vaccinations in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Unlike most Vaxxers, Sparrow comes right out and
says the vaccine is safe. "Not only is measles
proliferating; so are the nasty allegations about
the danger of the vaccine by anti-vaxxer
ideologues and unscrupulous politicians, even
though the vaccine is not only safe, but mass
measles vaccination is also the single best
public-health intervention we have" -- no "ifs,
ands, or buts" about it. Not even a qualifying
adverb like "reasonably" safe, "pretty" safe, and
the like. Just "safe". No one ever has
experienced any negative reaction to the MMR
vaccine, apparently. It's "safe". But of course,
it isn't. Recipients of the vaccine have
experienced all sorts of negative reactions.
Which discredits her entire string of absolutist
generalizations in her war-cry.
How can she fail to mention the patented MMR
vaccine's ingredients and their potential
dangers. In other words, no fair presentation of
the significant questions that pro-choicers are
raising, not even to strike them down in a rational manner, one by one.
According to the CDC list of excipient
ingredients in vaccines
(<http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/B/excipient-table-2.pdf>http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/B/excipient-table-2.pdf)
the patented MMR vaccines contain the following:
MMR (MMR-II): Medium 199, Minimum Essential
Medium, phosphate, recombinant human albumin,
neomycin, sorbitol, hydrolyzed gelatin, chick
embryo cell culture, WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts
MMRV (ProQuad): sucrose, hydrolyzed gelatin,
sorbitol, monosodium L-glutamate, sodium
phosphate dibasic, human albumin, sodium
bicarbonate, potassium phosphate monobasic,
potassium chloride, potassium phosphate dibasic,
neomycin, bovine calf serum, chick embryo cell
culture, WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts, MRC-5 cells
Additionally, we can ask whether injecting human
DNA into children may also cause autism (even
without mercury, which is not the only cause)?
And how about the MSG in one of the measles
vaccines, or the antibiotic neomycin and the GMO sorbitol in both?
They all contain animal parts, and are tested on animals.
Dr. Brian Hooker re-assessed data provided by the
Centers for Disease Control and found -- after
retractions and corrections -- links between the
timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism
incidence in African American males, and that
"consideration should be made in the current
United States vaccination schedule for genetic
subpopulations that may be associated with vaccine adverse events."
All unconscionably ignored by Dr. Sparrow.
Marshalling all the Vaxxer arguments against
parental choice -- which makes Sparrow's piece in
The Nation the important one to refute if you
advocate parental choice for the measles vaccine
-- Sparrow goes on to viciously attack, in
several blistering paragraphs, "the
unconscionable malpractice of Andrew Wakefield"
and The Lancet, which published Wakefield et
al.'s research results. Not a single mention that
British courts have exonerated Wakefield's co-researcher, and more.
Sparrow conflates incidence of measles with other
more deadly diseases, manufacturing and twisting
the hysteria (good debating technique, but not so
good if you want to get to the truth) and then
returns to talk about measles as though that's
what she was discussing all along, as though all
arguments around the patented MMR vaccine are the
same as those discussing other diseases and how to prevent them.
Along the way, she provides the basis for U.S.
imperial "intervention" in Africa, in the name of
"public health", while ignoring the rather
delicate "question" that of the SV40 virus, for
one, and pretending that it doesn't exist. The
CIA could not have done a better job.
Virologist Jonathan Latham explains this matter succinctly:
"My take on this issue (as a virologist) is that there are genuine and
scientific reasons to have concern about vaccines in general, and specific
reasons to have concern about certain individual ones. There have been
vaccine disasters and near-misses. For example, several million Americans
have the virus SV40 which they got from a contaminated vaccine. (SV stands
for Simian Virus). The biological consequences of SV40 virus are unknown.
But the point is the risks of vaccines are real and incontrovertible and can
hardly be denied.
At the same time there are companies hoping to make a lot of money from
vaccines who would like these risks to be buried."
Almost all "anti-Vaccine choicers", including
Sparrow, conflate and confuse what should be seen
as separate issues in a fair debate. The
questions around this particular vaccine are not
necessarily the same as those concerning other
vaccines. For some people they are, but for many
those questioning the particular MMR vaccine are
calling for professionals to go through the
studies one vaccine at a time, and examine each patented vaccine unto itself.
Nor is Sparrow above even obvious twistory of
political facts, that The Nation's fact-checkers
should have caught. She writes that "In Syria,
the government's efforts to withhold routine
childhood vaccinations in areas considered
politically unsympathetic to the dictatorship was
one of the reasons for the popular uprising." How
she omits that it was the UN that has halted a
measles vaccination campaign in northern Syria
after at least 15 children died after receiving
shots, as confirmed by the UN Children's Fund
(UNICEF) and World Health Organization, is simply
amazing. Following the vaccine, some of the
children's bodies swelled and they suffocated to
death. Readers should question every other "truth" that Dr. Sparrow proclaims.
One writer, Laura Costas, puts front and center
the need to examine each vaccine in actuality,
apart from the philosophizing about vaccines in general:
"I would examine [each vaccine type]
individually, actually. Five years ago when my
young cousin gave birth she was given a list of
27 innoculations she was expected to give her
newborn in the first 2 weeks of his life. Even if
we allow that the other "inactive" ingredients
are entirely harmless, do we really think that
this shock to an infant's immune system is negligible?
Serious, debilitating diseases are one thing, but
self-limiting or non life-threatening diseases
are quite another. I question the unquestioned
use of vaccines, and I certainly question the
good faith of the people who manufacture them.
Titers can measure the antibody level in the
blood, making boosters of questionable value as
well. Yet every schoolchild must have the boosters or no school!
That the purveyors of the vaccines are also
involved in bioweaponry is not up for grabs, it's
a fact. No entity is really keeping watch over
these people; the agencies whose mandate is to
protect us are populated and in many cases led by
former lobbyists for the industry. The
manufacturers also are the ones doing and
financing the science. That renders unreliable
the study, the manufacture and the distribution
of the vaccines--pretty much the whole ballgame.
This, as Mitchel points out, is simply capitalism
at work doing what it always does.
I think the main objection here is
over-vaccination, not vaccination in general, and
also the means of production if you will. I think
putting a perfectly healthy infant on the
pharmaceutical treadmill in the first two weeks
of his or her life is complete recklessness. Yet that's the current regime.
I don't think you can separate these objections
from the evaluation of risks to public health of
vaccinating or not vaccinating."
At least Jonas Salk, who invented the polio
vaccine that used dead virus particles, put the
vaccine into the public domain and gave up the
patent rights and private profits, for the public
good. (We should, however, discuss the polio
vaccines separately. Sparrow refuses to do so and
mixes it in with her pro-MMR arguments.) Would
Paul Offet -- the creepy vaccine entrepreuneur
posing as a public health advocate to increase
his profits -- put his money where his mouth is, as Salk had done? Ha!
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration takes
the profits away from Offet and out of vaccine
research and production, then watch how fast the
Vaxxers' tune will change. Apparently, they
demand the freedom of choice for themselves
against government fiat, but, like Dr. Sparrow,
deny that same freedom of choice to MMR vaccine challengers.
The Vaxxers' hypocrisy astounds in defense of
their profits. They're selling us the Pharm. It's the American way.
Mitchel Cohen
http://m.thenation.com/article/198609-what-anti-vax-movement-doesnt-tell-you-about-measles
What the Anti-Vax Movement Doesn't Tell You About Measles
by
<http://m.thenation.com/authors/annie-sparrow>Annie
Sparrow on February 19, 2015
"No cough, no measles" was one of the many
mantras and memory aids I learned in medical
school. Most were designed to reduce tomes like
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2760169/>Gray's
Anatomy and Harrison's Principles of Internal
Medicine to a few rules. Much of the time, it was
easy to miss the point, especially when the
subject seemed to be an obscure disease.
Five years into a six-year medical degree at a
typical Western university, none of us had ever
seen measles. Nor were we bothered. Apart from
HIV, microbes like measles seemed prehistoric.
Public health was out, plastic surgery was in.
Still, I remembered this particular rule, offered
by a much-revered professor. But I wondered why
he was so focused on a cough instead of "Koplik
spots," the little white dots in the mouth that are specific to measles.
Then I spent ten weeks in a pediatric
infectious-disease ward in Cape Town. I thought I
would see "African diseases" like hemorrhagic
fever and HIV, which I did. But I also saw
measles, rubella (German measles), scarlet fever,
syphilis, rheumatic fever, typhoid, tuberculosis
and many other causes of rash and fever.
Suddenly I could see the point of my professor's
rule. The very first signs of measles are a fever
and cough, followed by a runny nose and red eyes.
The appearance of a rash three or four days later
is usually what prompts parents to bring their
child to the emergency room. The problem is that
at any given time, half the pre-school children
in the ER have a fever, rash or both. The
differential diagnosis is hard enough in
immunized children, ranging from mild roseola to
devastating meningococcal sepsis; the long list
includes enterovirus 68, Lyme disease and drug
rashes. In an unimmunized child, the ailment
might also be rubellaharmless for the child, but
catastrophic for unimmunized pregnant patientsor chickenpox.
Or it might be measles, in which case you need to
know. Fast. Because measles is the most
contagious disease on earth. Among unimmunized
people exposed to the measles virus, some 90
percent will contract the disease. Anyone with
measles is contagious for several days before the
rash even appears; the cough effectively spreads
tiny droplets of the virus, which can remain in
the air for several hours, long after an infected
person has left the room. In an unvaccinated
community, each person who gets measles spreads
it on average to twelve others. Complications
like pneumonia and meningitis can be permanent,
deadly, or both, especially for
immune-compromised patients such as those with
cancer. And in the ER, one of these kids might be in the next bed.
<http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/user/20/measles-infographic-1200_0.jpg>
[]
<http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/user/20/measles-infographic-1200_0.jpg>(Click
to enlarge)
Older Americans remember measles as a common
childhood disease that just had to be suffered
through, but in fact it is still frequently
deadly in low- and middle-income countries. And
because the virus weakens the body's natural
immune system, children who survive measles get
more infections and have a higher risk of dying
from them for several months afterwards.
So a doctor needs to be able to diagnose measles
at "hello," not wait for the results of two blood
tests taken two weeks apart to see whether
antibodies are rising while the child spreads
measles, as happened at Disneyland. I rapidly
learned to recognize measles at ten paces, and
realized that the idea of using Koplik spots as a
diagnostic aid was better suited to passing exams
than clinical practice. Toddlers with measles
tend to be extremely irritable (another clue) and
not madly cooperative about opening their mouths
on request for viewing. Nor would you want to get
that close, if you're uncertain whether your parents had you immunized.
So the crucial question becomes: Cough, or no
cough? If there's no cough, it's not measles.
Period. Which is good, as excluding measles early
averts both parental and departmental panic. But
if an unimmunized child or adult is coughing,
take it very seriously. Ensure that the child is
kept away from places where he or she could
spread the disease to others. Educate parents on
how to treat the symptoms. And get the child out
of the ER as quickly as possible before he or she
infects other patients and staff.
These steps are all the more vital now that
measles, long forgotten, is "back" in the United
States and far too few doctors know how to
recognize it. And not only is measles
proliferating; so are the nasty allegations about
the danger of the vaccine by anti-vaxxer
ideologues and unscrupulous politicians, even
though the vaccine is not only safe, but mass
measles vaccination is also the single best public-health intervention we have.
As doctors, there are a few things that we know
are fundamental to our well-being. Most of these
are public-health measures that enable us to live
much longer and better lives, even to grow
taller, than 200 years ago. These measures of
mass salvation include water purification,
toilets and sanitation, garbage collection and
disposal, and vaccination to protect children
from infectious diseases like smallpox, polio and measles.
Smallpox was a seriously nasty disease, with a
fatality rate of 30 percent. For those who
survived, the pocks were permanent, and not
pretty. Eradication of this vicious virus was the
result of achieving global herd immunity, a feat
of international cooperation and cost-effective
investment in a global good. Herd immunity comes
from mass vaccination and eliminates the virus.
It protects the entire communityparticularly
children and adults who can't safely be immunized
and babies who are too young (a child must be 6
to 9 months old before the immune system is
sufficiently developed for the vaccine to work).
When the global campaign began in 1967, there
were 10 to 15 million cases of smallpox each
year. Places that had attained herd immunity,
such as Europe and North America, had to maintain
it to prevent imported cases from India and
Africa from triggering an epidemic while rigorous
surveillance to diagnose every last case and mass
vaccination campaigns around the world created
global herd immunity. Ten years later, the virus
died out. Smallpox eradication is the public
health success story of the twentieth century,
and because of it, we are now determined to try
to eradicate other infectious diseases, such as polio and measles.
Polio, perhaps the most frightening disease of
the twentieth century on account of its invisible
spread and devastating effect, crippled tens of
thousands of children each year before the
discovery of a vaccine sixty years ago. Americans
can be rightly proud of the March of Dimes, an
enormous effort driven by American mothers, which
raised tens of millions of dollars to find a
vaccine. The global campaign to eradicate polio
required massive international cooperation,
overcoming Cold War divisions, to bring the
number of global polio cases today down to a few
hundred a yeartantalizingly close to eradication.
Measles, like polio and smallpox, is a horrible
disease. Second only to smallpox in the total
number of deaths it has caused over the past two
millennia, it's still a major killer of children
under 5 years of age in the developing world. The
development of a vaccine was widely welcomed. It
is usually delivered jointly with vaccines for
mumps and rubella, known in combination as MMR.
One shot provides at least 95 percent protection and offers enduring immunity.
But because of vaccination lapses, measles is now
on the rise. There were twenty-three separate
outbreaks in the United States in 2014, involving
644 individual casesa record number since
measles was eliminated from the US in 2000. So
far in 2015, there have been 141 cases in
seventeen states, 80 percent of which are linked
to Disneyland. Blaming it on Mexico and porous
borders, as some opportunistic politicians have
done, has no basis in reality; there were only
two cases in Mexico in January, both imported
from the United States. Globally, the number of
deaths rose from 122,000 in 2012 to 146,000 in
2013, reversing a twelve-year downward trend. In
November 2014, the World Health Organization
(WHO) gave up on meeting its target for measles control.
It gets worse. Measles is so contagious that it
is used as the indicator disease to show deficits
in immunization coverage of all
vaccine-preventable diseaseswhich means the
problem goes well beyond measles. We should
hardly be surprised, then, that last year saw WHO
announce a Public Health Emergency of International Concern for polio.
Why is this happening?
In Syria, the government's efforts to withhold
routine childhood vaccinations in areas
considered politically unsympathetic to the
dictatorship was one of the reasons for the
popular uprising. Small wonder that polio
returned to Syria and that there have been more
than 10,000 cases of measles in 2014. Parents are
desperate for vaccines, and last year medical
workers braved Assad's barrel bombs to vaccinate
1.4 million unimmunized children in northern
Syria for polio, achieving 92 percent coverage,
equivalent to the rate in the United States.
Similarly in West Africa, people are begging for
Ebola vaccines. Yet in the United States the
anti-vaccination movement has seen increasing
numbers of parents refuse measles and other
vaccines "on behalf" of their unprotected children.
That misguided movement began with the
unconscionable malpractice of Andrew Wakefield. A
doctor who has since lost his license, he and his
coauthors of a 1998 article in The Lancet made up
a syndrome consisting of diarrhea and
developmental disorder ("regressive autism") that
he tried to link to the MMR vaccine for the sole
purpose of financial gain. He was not at the time
a practicing doctor, and had no expertise with
autism, but he manipulated parental fears and an
editor's penchant for controversial papers to
secure publication in The Lancet, a respected
medical journal. Extraordinarily, despite his
financial conflict of interest, despite having
fabricated the syndrome and falsified the data to
"fit" his criteria, his paper passed peer review.
That paper was then used to support litigation
against three companies that produced the MMR
vaccine, and to lobby for use of Wakefield's own
measles-only vaccine. Wakefield went on to make
more than more $600,000 in the process of the lawsuit alone.
In his 1998 paper, Wakefield alleged that eight
children developed autism six days after
receiving the MMR vaccine. I remember the paper
well, because I was a pediatric fellow in London
at the time. I and every other pediatrician were
immediately besieged by parents demanding
measles-only vaccines. We were staggered by
Wakefield's ridiculously small, uncontrolled and
clearly biased study about a syndrome that none
of us had heard of, even though the MMR vaccine
had been widely used since 1968. But it was also
hard to imagine that The Lancet would publish
something with such obvious global ramifications
unless there was irrefutable scientific evidence
uncontaminated by financial interest.
It took six years for The Lancet to admit
Wakefield's financial conflict of interest but it
did not retract the paper until 2010. Meanwhile,
the rise of measles in the United Kingdom and
United States reflects the damage done, and the
consequences extend well beyond the West. In
Nigeria in 2014, Ebola was successfully stopped
and polio seems to have been eliminated, yet this
country houses the greatest number of kids not
vaccinated for measles after India. Parents keen
on protecting their children from polio are known
to refuse the measles vaccine, not because of
myths about "a Western conspiracy of
sterilization" or fears that vaccinators are
"spies for the CIA" (after the CIA's clumsy
attempt to use a fake hepatitis B campaign to
access Osama Bin Laden's compound); rather, they
are familiar with the anti-vaccine movement
incited by Wakefield, asking, "If parents in
California aren't getting their kids vaccinated, why should we?"
Vaccination rates of 94 percent are needed to
prevent measles transmission in high-risk areas
such as child-care centers and schools. Yet in
Orange County and West Hollywood, many schools
have documented childhood immunization rates of
less than 92 percent, with some schools having
rates as low as 38 percentlevels seen in
developing countries. The Lancet could help by
publishing not just a retraction but also an
unequivocal editorial discarding the myth once and for all.
Using vaccination as a political tool is contrary
to the public good. Yet some politicians seem
unable to assert collective responsibility over
individualism: Chris Christie dithers about
balancing parental choice and public health,
while Rand Paul offers uniformed opinions and
contradictory behavior. The White House spokesman
said that "people should evaluate this for
themselves," though he urged a bias toward "good
science." Seriously? Should we also start
debating the value of safe drinking water and
sanitation? Throwing mud means lost ground, which measles relentlessly gains.
In medical school, I couldn't see myself in a
career in public health. (I instead became a
critical-care pediatrician.) Public health seemed
a "done deal" that everyone could see the value
of. I returned to it ten years later, a convert
to public and global health. Kids are the most
vulnerable, with their poorly developed immune
systems. They are also vulnerable to the
politicization of the public good, the only ones
without a direct say in the debates about their welfare.
And vaccines alone don't save lives: vaccinations
do. There's little point in having vaccines if
parents are allowed to refuse vaccination not
only "on behalf" of their own children, but also,
effectively, on behalf of other parents' babies
who are too young for vaccination, to say nothing
of kids born with immune disorders, for whom the
vaccine is ineffective. Parents are
understandably confused, but the increasing
polarization isn't helping. Amid the controversy,
it's easy to miss the point: a very serious
disease is getting on with its job of invading,
infecting and re-colonizing the country, and we
are losing control of it. The public good of herd
immunity can afford an occasional free-rider, but
when large numbers of people place their own
ideologies and idiosyncrasies above public
health, it's children who suffer the consequences.
It is particularly because of those children that
we need to take infectious disease more
seriously. Pandemics didn't happen until the
earth's population reached a critical mass. We
think of rats on ships spreading bubonic plague
in the Middle Ages, but it was the far deadlier
human-to-human pneumonic version that travelled
far and wide. (Both have now reappeared in Madagascar's prisons.)
Nor it is enough to focus on national health. In
an increasingly crowded and connected world, we
need to think of public health not simply locally
but globally. Air travel now means it is
impossible to stop viruses from spreading around
the globe. Germs are frequent flyers. Building
the homeland walls higher won't helpthe only
reliable antidote is building global public
health. We have to pay attention to the neglect
of infrastructure in West Africa, where Ebola
erupted, and the Syrian military's deliberate
destruction of public-health systems in
opposition-held areas, where polio emerged. SARS
became a global threat when China suppressed word
of its emergence. MERS now threatens from the
Persian Gulf. All of these diseases can easily
spread to the West with profound implications.
Just look at the effect of a few cases of Ebola in the United States.
Returning to measles, if the threat of that
deadly disease isn't enough for you to reject
anti-vax folklore, here's a little known fact
about the benefit of vaccination. The measles
vaccine doesn't only protect against measles.
Because it contains a small amount of a live
virus, the immune system must rev up to fight it,
which in turn reduces mortality from other
infectious diseaseincluding pneumonia, sepsis
and othersby 50 percent. This protective effect
lasts until a vaccine is administered with a
killed rather than a live virus, such as the one
for diphtheria and tetanus. So do you want to
protect your kids? Give them the measles vaccine.
And all of us should get educated. Education is a
social vaccine against sustained ignorance that
blocks effective and responsible responses to
public-health threats. But education alone is
insufficient to overcome self-interest. We all
need to act for the public good. Because when
public health is at stake, it's the children who
take the fall. Individuals and institutions that
are allowed to prioritize personal preference or
financial and political gain ahead of children's
health are irresponsible and unethical, and they
should not call the shots. In the short term,
children's health and lives are at risk; in the
long term, we jeopardize the local and global
control of these previously conquered diseases.
Prevention is not only better than curewhich
isn't an option for most of these diseasesit's
also more cost-effective. Current and past
pandemics reveal that when public health is
neglected, history repeats itself in an entirely predictable way.
Our common desire to protect the health and
well-being of children was always the best reason
to eliminate these diseases, and it remains our
best hope of bringing us all back to common
ground. Public health is about common sense and
common goods. Let's not allow spin doctors and
myths to prevail over our shared aim of
protecting the world's children from the world's oldest and deadliest diseases.