Godamighty, why is this so fucking hard for people to get? The fact that vaccines aren’t 100% effective is why they have to be mandatory! The point of mandatory vaccination is to achieve the herd immunity necessary to keep the small percentage who can’t be vaccinated or for whom the vaccines fail from starting an epidemic if they get sick. The point of herd immunity is keep fresh outbreaks from being transmitted to more than two or three so they burn themselves out after doing minimal harm rather than becoming an epidemic.
Likewise, the fact that they aren’t 100% safe is another reason they have to be mandatory–to protect society from the innumerate, historically illiterate special snowflakes who think their personal right not to expose themselves to tiny risks entitles them to subject society as a whole to enormous risks, and specifically, to the risk of returning us to the days when diphtheria, the “d” in the DPT vaccine, was a word that used to justifiably strike terror into the hearts of all parents everywhere rather than being a thing that’s about as real to people as Beowulf or the Trojan War.
We have a fund set up to compensate the tiny percentage of children who are permanently harmed by vaccination. It’s no consolation if it’s your child, but it’s a judgment we made, and that was properly made at a societal level, that having a tiny number of children get sick from vaccines is vastly preferable to having a huge number of people get sick because they aren’t vaccinated.
The issue here isn’t whether that decision, made at a time when those diseases were rampant, was right or wrong. It was right. It was indisputably right by any moral or rational criteria a reasoning moral being can possibly devise. Instead, the issue here is whether it’s enough to have learned that lesson once, or whether we’re going to have to learn it again and again and again and a decision we’re going to have to make over and over again, because we have idiots who think it’s all about them and their choices and who don’t really believe anything that happened in the past actually happened.
I’ve said this before: I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology of rumor and urban myth.
When holding some belief satisfies some need or if giving up the belief causes a loss of face, people holding the belief will grasp at anything in an attempt to shore up that belief or position when they’re shown to be wrong…
A politician of course runs the risk of looking dumb when shown to be wrong, but there are ways to give up a wrong position without looking too stupid or seeming to betray his followers who hold that belief.
How come nobody talks about the effects of the diseases targeted by vaccines. Measles was a very, very dangerous disease when “we all got it.” The parents of the first 2 generations of kids vaccinated against didn’t have any problem having their kids vaccinated.
By the way, great article. A factual timeline gives all of us something to really talk about.
Steve, you and people who read sites like TPM are educated – educated in the sense that they are not suffering from epistemic thinking disorders. They understand evidence and how we know what we know. emphasized text
I’ve taught in industry. i had a class of new employees once. 12 recent university grads all from a So Calif uniiversity (not UCLA). Two had MBA’s
They were dumb as friggin rocks. I had to be tactful, did not want to lose my job, but I could not believe what these adults – apprx half men, half women did not know. .
One woman had a degree in “data processing,” and did not know what an operating system is.
I used the word “sanction” once in a legal sense. No one knew the meaning of the word.
Well, yeah. I know what you mean and feel your pain. Hell, we were governed by those people from 2001-2009. But I just find it hard to accept that someone will come to the new, improved, troll-resistant TPM to opine on vaccination without grasping what herd immunity is and why it’s the public policy objective underlying mandatory vaccination.
There is no anti-vaccine science so quit using that term. There is real science, then there are schemes and scams that use the word science.
Once the prefix anti, is thrown in, it puts the user on the opposite side of science or reality. Anti-vaxx may be a real thing but it is a real dumb thing.
The chance of having a negative reaction to a vaccination and the real risk of an unvaccinated population aren’t in the same ball park. Hell, they aren’t even the same sport. Anti-vaxxers are playing extreme small ball and fuck your buddy all at once.
My children are vaccinated. (I do have some understanding of herd immunity)
I count 32 recommended injections.
Most of which have some (small) portion of the population that should avoid it. I know one anecdote personally. Probably he had a reaction to a first dose as an infant, and maybe should have avoided the second dose as a 4 yr old.
His parents (who are not anti-vax either) have had trouble getting help. The highly politicized nature of this is has not been helpful to them.
Edit: And just to be clear, with my unscientific statistics, I know maybe 400 kids. None have died or been maimed by any childhood disease. One lost maybe 25 IQ pts, possibly from disease prevention. I don’t see that as a bad trade off.
For those of you who are fortunate enough to have never seen this disease in person but still fight to have everyone immunized, thank you. I’m nearly 70 years old, and there was no vaccine for it when I was a kid. So we all got it. It was a terrible thing to have – high fever and a rash that spread all over your body and dehydration and real sickness, and we were in bed for weeks.
The chance of blindness caused by this disease is so prevalent that our mothers did everything possible to keep us in total darkness, thinking that might help ward off having us go blind. I don’t know if that helped prevent losing our sight, but it was so uncomfortable in a reasonably light room (measles affects the mucous membranes and dry eyes are part of it) that no kid objected to whatever was done to darken it for us. My own mother climbed on furniture to cover the windows in my bedroom with army blankets – thick wool dark green things that let nothing shine through, and taped them to the windowsill so there were no cracks of sunlight – then she sat on a chair outside my bedroom door where she had enough light to read to me through the closed door.
We knew a family where one of the children had gone blind from it, and one whose child died from it. Measles and polio were feared by every parent in those days. The idea that anyone today is so selfish that they feel no responsibility to protect the entire population sickens me.
The old college joke was:
BS = the obvious
MS = more of the obvious
PhD= piled higher and deeper
Just because you have an advanced degree paradoxically doesn’t mean one is intelligent. I have worked with hundreds of BS, MS, and PhD’s, and the latter group anecdotally/empirically has the highest incidence of prima donas and retreads. Wakefield was obviously one of them.
Here’s Roald Dahl relating (in 1988) the death of his 7-year-old daughter from encephalitis brought on by measles, and encouraging everyone to be vaccinated. She got them back when the vaccine was new and not as effective. Heartbreaking.
edited to correct relationship was daughter, not granddaughter
Bill Thomas’ last-second, completely covert inclusion of a Thimerosal provision in the Patriot Act, which got a lot of conspiracy theorists going. (Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly was his biggest donor at the time).
The profound willingness to embrace this anti-vaxxing stuff. In California, where the measles outbreak got its start, you have a small amount of the population not vaccinating for “personal beliefs” reasons. However, some counties are much more risk-loving than others.
The anti-vaccine craze was not started by some article in 1998. I know two parents who refused to allow their kids to get their shots in the early 1990s. The son of one of them ended up with whooping cough; that parent was a credulous hippie.
The other parent was a smart PhD whose brother had contracted encephalitis in childhood; her parents blamed vaccines, though I don’t think they had any evidence. I don’t know how you get through the resistance of someone who had this experience.
Yep, the BMJ report in 2011 went through the original cases and found that in the majority of them Wakefield completely misrepresented what had happened. Not little things, but big things like whether the kids had any pre-existing problems, the time between vaccination and supposed onset of symptoms, the symptom the kids had. You name it. Calling it “ethical lapses” is like saying Bernie Madoff committed ethical lapses.
After Rand Paul ran his mouth on the subject of vaccines the other day, I have been looking for an article like this; one that addresses the way in which these urban myths have developed. Thanks for the information; it is really useful.
Hillary Clinton made public comments in 2008, but for some reason you seem to have left this prospective candidate’s comments out of your article. Hmmmmm, not difficult to find; simply google it.
