Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All

On one side are parents. Every week they’re bombarded with stories about the dangers of vaccines. They hear that babies get too many vaccines, overwhelming their immune systems—then they watch them get as many as thirty-five shots in a span of only a few years and sometimes five at one time. They hear that vaccines cause chronic diseases. And they hear this from people they trust: celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Bill Maher, Don Imus, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carrey; elected representatives like Carolyn Maloney, Chris Smith, Dave Weldon, and Dan Burton; television correspondents like Sharyl Attkisson of
CBS Evening News
; and popular doctors like Mehmet Oz and Robert Sears. But mostly they hear it from parents like themselves—parents who claim their children were fine one minute, got a vaccine, then weren’t fine anymore. Understandably, some parents are backing away from vaccines; one in ten are choosing not to give one or more vaccines. Some aren’t giving any vaccines at all; since 1991 the percentage of unvaccinated children has more than doubled.

On the other side are doctors. Weary of parents who insist on individualized schedules, scared to send children out of their offices unvaccinated, and concerned that their waiting rooms, packed with unvaccinated children, are becoming a dangerous place, they’re taking a stand. As many as four in ten pediatricians now refuse to see families who don’t vaccinate, causing some parents to seek the comfort of doctors or chiropractors more willing to do what they ask.

Caught in the middle are children. Left vulnerable, they’re suffering the diseases of their grandparents. Recent outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough, and bacterial meningitis have caused hundreds to suffer and some to die—die because their parents feared vaccines more than the diseases they prevent.

Amid the confusion, another group has emerged: parents angry that unvaccinated children have put their children at risk. Some of these parents have children who can’t be vaccinated. Weakened by chemotherapy for their cancers, or immunosuppressive therapy for their transplants, or steroid therapy for their asthma, these children are particularly vulnerable. They depend on those around them to be vaccinated; if not, they’re the ones most likely to suffer during outbreaks.

We’ve come to a crossroads. During the past two decades, as more states have allowed exemptions to vaccination, population immunity has broken down. And the questions have gotten harder. Should states continue to allow parents to opt out of vaccines? Or should they step in and take away that right?

The fear of vaccines, the choice to act on that fear, the consequences of that choice, and the voices rising in protest are the subjects of this book.

INTRODUCTION

All horror movies start the same way. Whether the scene is an abandoned cabin, a dark alley, or a peaceful cottage, one line of dialogue, quietly uttered five minutes before the carnage starts, is inevitable: “Did you hear something?”

Such is the case with certain infections in American children. On February 17, 2009, Robert Bazell, a science correspondent for
NBC Nightly News
, told the story of an unusual outbreak in Minnesota: a handful of children had contracted meningitis caused by the bacterium
Haemophilus influenzae
type b, or Hib. What made this outbreak so unusual was that it didn’t have to happen; a vaccine to prevent Hib had been around for twenty years. But most of the Minnesota children—including one who died from the disease—weren’t vaccinated. The problem wasn’t that their parents couldn’t afford vaccines, or that they didn’t have access to medical care, or that they didn’t know about the value of vaccines. The problem was that they were afraid: afraid that vaccines contained dangerous additives ; or that children received too many vaccines too soon; or that vaccines caused autism, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, and hyperactivity. And despite scientific studies that should have been reassuring, many parents weren’t reassured. When the outbreak was over, one mother reconsidered her decision: “The doctor looked at me and said, ‘Your son is going to die. He doesn’t have much time.’ Honestly, I never really understood how severe the risk [was] that we put our son at.”

The Minnesota outbreak wasn’t an isolated event. In 2008 and 2009, outbreaks of Hib meningitis occurred in Pennsylvania, New York, Oklahoma, and Maine, killing at least four more children; in each case, parents had made the choice not to vaccinate—a choice that proved fatal.

Most parents today have probably never heard of Hib. But older doctors certainly remember it; so do grandparents. Before the vaccine, Hib caused meningitis, bloodstream infections, and pneumonia in twenty thousand children every year, killing a thousand and leaving many with permanent brain damage. Today’s outbreaks are a fraction of what they were in the past. But, as more parents choose not to vaccinate, more outbreaks of preventable infections are popping up across the country. And more children are needlessly harmed. The phenomenon doesn’t seem to be going away. So the questions remain: Have we heard something? Are these outbreaks just a blip on the radar screen? Or do they represent a deeper, far more serious problem?

Hib isn’t the only concern. Whooping cough, measles, and mumps—diseases once easily controlled by vaccines—are also coming back.

Whooping cough (pertussis) is a devastating infection. Before a vaccine was first used in the United States in the 1940s, about three hundred thousand cases of whooping cough caused seven thousand deaths every year, almost all in young children. Now, because of the pertussis vaccine, fewer than thirty children die every year from the disease. But times are changing.

Vashon Island is a small commuter island in King County, Washington. About ten thousand people live there, mostly well educated and affluent. The island supports an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. Although schools on Vashon Island look like schools in any other upscale community, one difference isn’t immediately obvious. About one in seven children on the island is unvaccinated; in the middle school, it’s one in four. The consequences of this choice first appeared in the early 1990s. In 1994, the children of Vashon Island suffered 48 cases of whooping cough; in 1995, the number increased to 263; by 1999, it was 458.

Although whooping cough often starts benignly, it’s not a benign disease. Children with whooping cough first suffer congestion, coughing, and runny noses. Then they get the symptom that gives the disease its name. The bacterium that causes whooping cough,
Bordetella pertussis
, triggers the accumulation of thick, sticky mucus in the windpipe. Children try to rid themselves of the mucus by coughing; but it’s so gummy and tenacious that it’s impossible to cough up. Panicking, a child coughs and coughs—as many as twenty times in a row—without breathing in. Because these coughing spells deprive children of oxygen, many cough until they’re literally blue in the face. The long-awaited breath, taken against a narrowed windpipe, creates an unmistakable high-pitched sound. Parents who hear the whoop of whooping cough never forget it.

Coughing isn’t the only problem. Some children with whooping cough suffer pneumonia when pertussis bacteria travel to their lungs, or seizures when their brains don’t get enough oxygen, or suffocation when mucus completely blocks their windpipes. Some cough so hard that they break ribs or so long that they become malnourished.

Although Vashon Island is an excellent example of what can happen when parents stop giving pertussis vaccine, it isn’t the only example. On May 10, 2008, an outbreak of whooping cough occurred at the East Bay Waldorf School in El Sobrante, California. The Waldorf School follows the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, author of
Fundamentals of Anthroposophical Medicine
. Steiner believes that vaccination “interferes with karmic development and the cycles of reincarnation.” As a result of this philosophy, at least sixteen students, mostly kindergarteners, suffered the disease; virtually all were unvaccinated. When health officials investigated the outbreak—and discovered just how many children were left vulnerable—they did something that rarely occurs in twenty-first-century America. They closed the school until the epidemic subsided.

Pertussis outbreaks haven’t been limited to Washington and California ; they’ve also occurred in Delaware, Illinois, Mississippi, Arizona, Oregon, and Vermont. The outbreak in Delaware in 2006 prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue a simple, frightening statement in its publication
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
: “This age distribution is similar to that observed in the pre-vaccine era.” One city, Ashland, Oregon, has an elementary school in which not a single child is vaccinated.

Measles is also coming back.

On May 4, 2005, a seventeen-year-old unvaccinated Indiana girl boarded a plane to Bucharest, Romania. Sent on a mission by her church, she visited an orphanage and a hospital. She didn’t know that Romania was in the midst of a measles epidemic. On May 14, on the plane back to Indiana, she developed fever, cough, runny nose, and pink eye. The next day, she went to a church picnic attended by five hundred people. Although she felt ill, she was excited to share her experiences with her friends and neighbors. Neither she nor anyone at the picnic knew she had measles. On May 16, a red, speckled rash appeared on most of her body.

On May 29, two weeks after the picnic, the Indiana State Health Department received a phone call from a doctor in Cincinnati who recently had admitted a severely dehydrated six-year-old boy to the hospital. His diagnosis: measles. The doctor called health officials to tell them where the boy had been two weeks earlier: a church picnic in Indiana. The subsequent investigation was a case study in just how contagious measles virus can be. Among the 500 people at the picnic, 35 had never received a measles vaccine—31 of them (89 percent) became infected. Of the remaining 465 people, only 3 (0.6 percent) were infected. The girl who had contracted measles in Romania—after spending only a few hours in a crowd of 500 people—had managed to infect almost every person susceptible to the disease.

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