Pots and kettles

Last night, while going on an emergency formula/bum wipe run, I caught an interview on "All Things Considered" with Amy Wallace. Ms. Wallace is the author of an article in the most recent issue of Wired about the anti-vaccine panic, and the ill effects it is doing to the health of the public at large. It's a very well-written piece, and worth reading in its entirety.

Perhaps the most important bit is this:

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

Ms. Wallace was interviewed in large part to discuss the reaction she has received since the piece was published. It has been precisely as intelligent and well-reasoned as I would have expected.

"I've heard a lot of anger. I've heard that I'm stupid. I've heard that I'm greedy. I've heard that I did this to get famous," Wallace tells NPR's Melissa Block. "I've heard that I'm a whore, I'm a prostitute."

I will get to a particular reaction in just a moment. But first, let's look at something that Ms. Wallace reported in her piece.

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

I have already written about the flagrantly dishonest stance Jim Carrey takes with regard to his own scientific expertise and knowledge about vaccines. I find the quote above nauseating.

Rotavirus is a deadly illness. Before we started vaccinating children regularly, it was an inevitability that every season at least a few children from our practice would be hospitalized (sometimes for a week or more) with severe dehydration and intractable vomiting. We vaccinate children because we do not want them to die, regardless of what the awful Jim Carrey has to say.

But speaking of Fire Marshall Bill, let's see what JB Handley, who founded the organization Operation Rescue (for which Jim Carrey sits on the board), has to say.

Unbelievable. That was my first reaction to reading Wired Magazine’s new cover story on vaccines and autism that you can read HERE. It’s not a thoughtful look at both sides of the debate. It’s not a piece providing a new spin on a well-known conflict. It’s simply a regurgitation of Paul Offit’s talking points that he’s been dishing out to the uninformed media now for years. Ms. Wallace didn’t just drink Offit’s Kool-aid, shit, she scooped the Kool-Aid out of the rusty old bucket to make enough for everyone!

Read the whole piece, I urge you. Look at what this man, who is one of the leading anti-vaccine voices in America today, has to say. Examine the quality of thought of the man who speaks in opposition to the Centers for Disease Control, American Academy of Pediatrics, and essentially every single reputable scientific body that has addressed the question.

One thing in particular from his screed I would like to highlight, because it sticks so uncomfortably in my craw:

Comment: If 1 in 100 kids have vaccine-induced autism, this may challenge your conclusion about “low-risk,” unless you like those odds. Few parents do, and your article is unlikely to change that.

My friends, this statement is the most unmitigated hogwash I have ever read in my life. I have been a practicing pediatrician for ten years (if you include residency), and have administered vaccines to thousands of patients. I have yet to encounter one single patient with even the faintest suggestion of vaccine-related autism. My colleagues, who have been in practice decades longer than I have, could doubtless say the same thing. If vaccines caused autism in "1 in 100 kids," we would stop administering them. We enjoy no benefit from vaccinating children beyond the knowledge that we are doing what we should to prevent deadly illnesses. If there exists any relationship between vaccines and autism, it is so minute and tenuous that no reputable study has found it. It is so small as to be scientifically, mathematically undetectable.

But charlatans like Handley create the impression of a relationship by spewing forth garbage like this to a credulous public. He has the unmitigated gall to assume Ms. Wallace has educated herself at "Google University," which is exactly where most of his followers get their information. He is a dangerous and misguided (or worse) man, and will be largely responsible for the (mark my words) inevitable re-emergence of diseases that have been unseen in America for decades.

[Ed. If you have a point you wish to make, you are free to offer a comment. Copying and pasting paragraph upon paragraph of selective information does not count as commentary, and will be summarily deleted when I come upon it.]