Immune to Reason?

For instance, when I searched vaccine recently, I came across several YouTube videos describing a “global vaccine conspiracy,” clips from the Big Pharma conspiracy flick The Constant Gardener, a page dedicated to vaccine injuries, and several sites advocating home schooling as a way to opt out of immunization, and then I found the listing for the World Health Organization and the Vaccine Education Center, a resource page run by the well-respected Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Narrowing the search to Minnesota, I was directed to the state health department and a nonprofit group called Vaccine Awareness Minnesota based in Crystal.

I called both numbers to see if I could verify a point I’d come across in Time saying that Minnesota and Colorado had the nation’s highest percentage of kindergartners—between 5 and 6 percent—exempted from vaccinations for religious or philosophical reasons. I talked to Kris Ehresmann, the state’s immunization chief, and Christina Abel, the founder and executive director of VAM, and they agreed that the Time report had overstated the actual number, which both estimated to be around 3 percent. But that may be one of the few things the two women agree on.

Abel, a nonpracticing licensed nurse, has made vaccines “an academic hobby” for nearly twenty years. Her website says its aim is to promote “informed decision-making regarding vaccinations and Minnesotan’s right to conscientious objection,” though she says, “My purpose is not to promote either way.” As for her own choice, the mother of nine says, “I don’t need to fix something that’s not broken. Besides, these vaccine-preventable diseases are not life threatening to most people anyway.”

Ehresmann disagrees and points out that the argument is common among a generation of parents with no memory of German measles and whose grandparents may not even remember that the 1946 state fair was cancelled because of polio fears. “Because we’re not seeing these diseases like we used to, the focus has shifted to adverse events,” she says, adding that some vaccine-preventable illnesses are staging comebacks. In the last decade, whooping cough has whipped through Boulder, Colorado, where pertussis vaccination rates are low. Measles—nearly wiped out eight years ago—saw a surprising resurgence in the United States last year, with 131 reported cases, more than 90 percent of them in individuals who, for religious or philosophical reasons, weren’t vaccinated, including twenty-five home-schooled kids in suburban Chicago.

It’s probably worth noting that media coverage, which tries to balance the views of a handful of worried parents against the voice of medical authority, may only further the impression that there’s a controversy about vaccines within the world of public health or that a critical mass of parents are rejecting vaccines for their children. There isn’t, and they aren’t.

While Jenny McCarthy may be appearing on the cover of US Weekly, the vast majority of parents—upwards of 90 percent—line up behind Amanda Peet and the advice of their own pediatricians. And while pediatricians may be spending a lot of office time explaining immunizations, Sharon Jaeger and her colleagues are also getting a surprising number of requests from parents who want their daughters to be given Gardasil, a vaccine to prevent four strains of the human papillomavirus linked to cervical cancer. I myself was enthusiastic about the new vaccine for rotavirus—a gastrointestinal bug that contributes to the death of more than 500,000 children every year—after one of my kids was hospitalized with a severe case.

In fact, it’s the community aspect of immunity—because our children bring us into contact with everyone else’s children—that public health experts believe they must emphasize if the established science isn’t moving parents like it used to. “People think it’s more passive, or less risky, to opt out [of vaccinations], but you don’t know when measles are coming to your community,” says Patsy Stinchfield. While most of us are lucky enough to have no memory of the childhood diseases prevented by vaccines, she says, we need to remember that “to do nothing is actually a risk.”

Stinchfield was making this case to a new mother who had recently arrived from Somalia, explaining through an interpreter why she was recommending vaccinations for the fifteen-month-old child in the woman’s lap. Halfway through the doctor’s speech, the mother held up her hand. “I thought, ‘Oh, no—what now?’” Stinchfield recalls. But the woman simply wanted to explain that her baby had been born with a twin who died of measles in a refugee camp in Kenya. “That mother,” Stinchfield says, “she wanted that shot.”