Public Enemy Number One

I do my best to live and let live. I understand that not everyone is going to agree about everything, and not everyone is going to agree with me. I’m passionate about the things I hold true, but I try not to beat people over the held with it. Each to their own, right?
However, there are times when things can harm others. One of my hot-button issues is marriage equality. I do not take kindly to those who would deny people I love and value the same rights that are afforded to the rest of us. Are people physically harmed by laws that prohibit same-sex marriage? Perhaps not, but they are emotionally and psychologically harmed, and they are being treated as “less than” the rest of us. I simply cannot abide that, and I will do whatever I can to ensure that these laws go by the wayside. It’s only a matter of time.

My other hot-button issue—probably my main one—is vaccines, which will come as no surprise to many of you. I’ve gotten riled up about this before. Well, I’m even more riled up now. In fact, I’m loaded and ready for bear.

I’m downright pissed.

We are starting to see more and more reports of preventable diseases in our country and in the world. Let me reiterate that. Preventable diseases. Outbreaks of measles in New York and British Columbia; outbreaks of pertussis in California and the Midwest; outbreaks of polio in Africa and Pakistan; twenty years after measles was considered to be all but eradicated, it is once again endemic—meaning that it exists there, rather than is a rarity—in the United Kingdom.

This is insane. This has to stop. These are life-threatening infections that can be prevented by vaccines. The worst case scenario is that people will die from these infections, and that happens all the time. Other consequences of infection are deafness, blindness, sterility, and brain damage. There have been over two dozen studies consisting of hundreds of thousands of children that show that there is absolutely no connection between vaccines and autism, but there are still those who cling to their irrational and unscientific beliefs that vaccines are harmful. The initial study that posited a connection, by Andrew Wakefield in the UK, consisted of twelve children. TWELVE. His study was shown to be fraudulent and unethical, it was retracted by the Lancet, and he was stripped of his medical license. He was working for a rival vaccine company, and he completely fabricated a bowel disease caused by the MMR vaccine.

THAT is the guy that these people are still following. An unethical shill for a company that wanted to market an alternative vaccine.

I’m all for letting people live their lives as they see fit, but that doesn’t apply here. Because these decisions aren’t just impacting your child. They are impacting the newborn next door who is too young to be vaccinated. They are impacting your elderly mother who can’t fight off infections as easily. They are impacting the guy you see at the grocery store who is battling cancer. They are impacting the person with AIDS, the person who had a lung transplant, the person with rheumatoid arthritis, the person who had a bone marrow transplant to fight breast cancer or testicular cancer or leukemia. YOUR selfish and uninformed decisions have the potential to literally kill people, including people that I love.

So I am done with this “I understand your viewpoint” bullshit. Because I do NOT understand your viewpoint. You are basing your decisions on a discredited study, you know nothing about legitimate science or how the immune system works, and you have decided that your thousands of hours of Google research of fringe websites and alleged scientific papers that are not peer-reviewed is somehow the equivalent of people who have spent years in school learning about how these things actually work and who have spent their lives trying to find a way to prevent others from dealing with these diseases and their consequences.

I am past the point where I am willing to say that your concerns about vaccinations have merit. They don’t. You don’t understand the first thing about medicine or vaccines or the immune system, and you suck. You are willing to put your own child at risk because of your delusions. Even if your child caught one of these preventable diseases and survived, why would you subject them to the fever and potential trauma that can come with these diseases? Why would you take that risk? Why would you knowingly subject others to such a risk? This is monstrous. You are a threat to public health and you are a threat to a healthy society.

If you want to continue on this ridiculous pathway, go live in a commune in the woods or on an island and take your chances there. Stay the fuck out of our public spaces and deal with your infections on your own. I pity your kids, and I wish I could charge you with criminal negligence. But we’re not at that point yet, so just go away and stop infecting people because you’re too rock stupid to understand how serious these infections are and how safe the vaccines are.

Dr. Paul Offit has said that things probably won’t change until we start seeing a comeback of these preventable diseases, and people once again understand how serious they can be. I’m sorry to say that it seems that he is right. We are now seeing a resurgence of these infections, and it is up to the rest of us to push back against the ignorance and say that we value the societal contract. If we are to be a part of society, we need to understand that our actions have consequences. When you make that misinformed decision for your own child, you are making it not just for them, but for many others.

I am to the point of shunning and public shaming. I don’t want to be around you if you choose to ignore vaccines, and I will not hesitate to point out that you are ignorant about medicine, immunology, and microbiology. The tide is turning against you, anti-vaxxers. As more people come down with preventable diseases, we will blame YOU.

Count on it.

The other class

No, not socioeconomic classes! Remember, Rick Santorum says we don’t have those here. That’s Marxism talk!

Today I started the second class I’m taking through Coursera. This one, Vaccines, is actually relative to what I did for many years (Microbiology), and it is taught by Dr. Paul Offit, who is an outspoken critic of the anti-vaxxer movement. He touched briefly on that in the introduction video, in which he talked about the three vaccination exemptions in the United States.

Medical: You have an allergy to one of the components of the vaccine, like eggs in influenza vaccines.

Religious: Obvious, but he questioned why any religion would specifically ban vaccinations, because religious books like the Bible and the Koran were written long before vaccinations were invented. He said this seemed to originate more with the Christian Science movement, which says that infections like smallpox are a “state of mind” and should be prayed away. No comment, but you can probably guess what I think about that!

Philosophical: This is the exemption that anti-vaxxers use. They choose not to vaccinate based on their personal belief system. Dr. Offit had a great point in that it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe vaccines work. They have been shown over and over in thousands of studies to effectively prevent infectious diseases. The supposed autism connection has been thoroughly disproven, the original paper from Andrew Wakefield completely discredited, and his medical license in England was stripped.

Then Dr. Offit talked about the earliest forms of vaccines, which involved whole animals for production. These included smallpox, polio, and rabies. The rabies vaccine developed by Louis Pasteur is still in use.

I enjoyed it very much, and I took the quiz. I found myself wishing there were a couple more lectures this week, but that’s it for the week. This isn’t anything new for me, but it’s something that I’m still interested in and it’s fun for me to do this course. I don’t get college credit for it, but I don’t really need that, do I? This is just learning for learning’s sake, and that can be the best kind.

Infection Connection: Double Shot!

This isn’t about any particular bacteria, virus, or other wee beastie. This is a review of two books concerning infectious disease, one fiction and one non-fiction. (By the way, I’m up to 50 books read this year. My goal is within sight!)

First is one I’ve been wanting to read for some time, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, by Seth Mnookin. Of all the articles and a few books I’ve read about the anti-vaccine movement, this reigns supreme. Mnookin does an incredible job of discussing the devastation of infectious disease, the development of inoculation/vaccination, and how the anti-vaccine movement began and took hold.

He also masterfully skewers the arguments put forth by the anti-vax crowd, although I would agree with him that they aren’t just anti-vax; they are anti-science. It is inexcusable for anyone to simply ignore the facts of the high rate of efficacy and low rate of complications of vaccines, not when children’s health and public health are at stake. One of the rationales for some is that there is so little exposure to these infections that they aren’t worried about their child getting it. Do you know why there is so little exposure? Because vaccines have been so successful! It is simply not acceptable to say, “I know, because I have mommy-instincts.” Science simply does not work that way. My great-uncle Sid died in his early twenties of diphtheria. People have forgotten that these infections can and do kill people.

Mnookin gives plenty of space to Andrew Wakefield, the unethical, sorry excuse for both a doctor and human being who started this whole ridiculous mess with his flawed and unscientific paper published in the British medical journal Lancet. The paper has since been withdrawn, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in England. His studies were horrible, including contamination from control strains of the measles virus, and not including positive and negative controls in each experiment. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of laboratory tests knows that in order to confirm your results, you must have known positives and negatives included to show that your assay is working properly.

Mnookin also provides much criticism to the media, who gave this story legs despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a good thing for journalism to be fair and balanced, but sometimes, the other side of the argument does not bear up under proper examination; such false and harmful misinformation should not deserve equal treatment. There are two sides to every story, and sometimes one side is simply wrong.

A fantastic book, and one of my new favorites. Anyone who is sitting on the fence or has doubts about immunizations should read this. Anyone (like me) who believes that vaccines save lives should also read it, in order to bolster your arguments if you’re ever in the situation where you want to debate the subject with someone who really doesn’t get it.

Next is Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. Although a fictional book, it is based on the real village of Eyam in Derbyshire, which voluntarily quarantined itself during the Black Plague of 1665-66. Brooks puts a human face on sterile statistics; it’s one thing to know that Europe possibly lost one-half to two-thirds of its population, or that bubonic plague has a 40-90% mortality rate if untreated. It’s quite another to read about Anna Frith, a housemaid who must face the death of loved ones and see her rural village felled by the Plague.

Anna is a likable character, compelled to learn, and she is strengthened by her trials. The same can’t be said for many of her fellow villagers, who at times descend into irrational fear and murderous ways. The sadness that Anna had to deal with brought tears to my eyes several times throughout the book. The horrors of the deaths and losses, her triumphs and the failures of others, shows how devastating such a pandemic would be upon even our modern-day world. Although our medical knowledge and support is substantially greater now, the stress placed upon our infrastructure and society would still be devastating. People haven’t changed so much in four hundred years or so to think that there wouldn’t be blame to be laid upon others, certain ethnic groups or religious sects forced to be the scapegoat.

This book reminded me very much of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Although Porter’s novella dealt with the 1918 influenza pandemic, the psychological and social strain of such a devastating and lethal pandemic is the same. The horrors of such widespread disease and panic is brought to life in both books.

Those who would condemn vaccinations would be wise to read both of these books and learn more about just how bad infectious disease can be.