Vaccines Are Not a Shot in the Dark

Photo via Flickr / CC. 

As I recover from a summer illness that left me delirious for about a week, I am reminded of how grateful I am to medical science for helping to attenuate ailments even as inconsequential as a nagging summer cold. I especially like vaccines. There’s not much better than a quick shot, or patch, that renders you immune to ailments that suck to have.

Yet, vaccination remains one of the most controversial topics of modern medicine. Sites like naturalnews.com, which surgical oncologist David Gorski has called “one of the most wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet,” are known for their misguided and injurious fear mongering on the matter.

Political figures like Michele Bachmann have made unfounded claims about their “dangerous side effects.” Even our beloved Hollywood actors have succumbed to the scourge of delusion that surrounds vaccines. If legendary thespians Jim Carrey and Rob Schneider can so brilliantly render “dumb” people and male gigolos, respectively, we should adhere to their stances on matters concerning immunology, right?

Not necessarily. Several recent studies reveal that vaccines are working exactly as they are supposed to. Since the introduction of vaccines for cancer-causing strains of HPV, for example, incidence of those strains has halved, falling from 7.32 percent in 2006 to 3.6 percent in 2010–a 56 percent drop. Considering that HPV is thought to cause about 5 percent of all cancers worldwide, this is not insignificant.

If you’re one of those young people who doesn’t have sex, however, and these statistics don’t concern you, consider something that you’ve most certainly contracted: the flu. Another recent study by the Centers for Disease Control looked at influenza vaccination program effectiveness from 2006 through 2011. Relying on, umm, “existing surveillance data,” they estimated that influenza vaccinations prevented anywhere from 1.1 million to 5 million cases, and saved anywhere from 7,700 to 40,400 trips to the hospital over the six year period.

Both of these recent findings provide great evidence that vaccines are a boon for maintaining public health, and that they’re certainly not failing to work as advertised. So, what’s with all the lingering skepticism?

Nowadays, many people in favor of vaccination will blame the undue fears on a 1998 study authored by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that appeared in the British medical journal BMJ. This study claimed an association between an MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps, and rubella) and autism in children. Given the mystery of autism and its causes, much of which still persists, people were quick to flock to the premature explanation the study suggested. It wouldn’t be for a few years that the scientific community came to the consensus that the association was, in fact, not real at all.

Carrey and wife Jenny McCarthy on Larry King Live

The journal eventually retracted Wakefield’s study on the grounds that it was downright fraudulent. As Fiona Godlee, BMJ‘s editor of chief, told CNN, “It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors, but in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.” The study may not have been real, but its effects on the public’s perception were. It did damage that many are finding is hard to undo.

More than being just a cause of vaccine skepticism, though, the study was maybe an effect of it too. For hundreds of years–since the dawn of immunology really–there has been backlash against the principles of vaccination. In his 1772 sermon “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation,” Rev. Edward Massey argued that pathology was God’s just means of punishing human sin, and that a measure taken to prevent it was “a diabolical operation.”

Though most people will now find this reasoning antiquated to the point of being silly, a substantial sect still harbor emotional aversions similar to Massey’s in their entanglement with religious ideology.

People whose religious beliefs dictate things like sexual abstinence before marriage have fears that the HPV vaccines, for example, will promote promiscuity. For the same reason, even many doctors are reluctant to recommend the vaccine for younger children. Still, about a third of American teenage girls have received the full dose of the HPV vaccine, which requires several appointments spread over a period of months. The CDC estimates that if vaccination rates remain steady, 14,000 potential cervical cancer-related deaths of girls that are now under 13 will be avoided. More vaccinations would increase this effect.

We need to protect both ourselves, and subsequent generations, by admitting that these vaccines, and vaccines in general, help society. We need to ignore those who demonize them as a result of their own religious and/or political biases.

Speaking about the HPV vaccines specifically, Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the New York Times, “The bottom line is this: It is possible to protect the next generation from cancer, and we need to do it.”