The Current Measles Craze

Because I keep getting frantic calls from parents about this, and even such usually sensible sources as NPR and National Geographic are calling out "anti-vaxxers" as irrational, deluded, or even anti-scientific, the worst insult of all, hitherto applied only to climate deniers and those other yahoos and neanderthals of the Republican persuasion, I feel compelled to throw my own two cents in, and to try to inject at least a modicum of common-sense and sanity into the mix, so I don't need to repeat the same things over and over, even though I have to admit that I've been doing just that for the past several decades to the few who would listen.

So first let me begin with something so obvious that it's almost embarrassing to have to say it out loud, namely, that what we're talking about is a few hundred cases of a disease that I like almost all of my contemporaries caught and recovered from as children.  Granted, a few people continued to develop encephalitis or pneumonia and die from them; and it was still a killer disease in isolated populations encountering it for the first time.  

But from the point of view of public health, pediatricians in that pre-vaccine era counted it among the "normal diseases of childhood," not only because it attacked almost everybody, and almost everybody recovered from it without complications, but also and especially because the immunity that resulted from it was thorough, virtually absolute, and lifelong.   That meant, first of all, that children recovering from it would never get it again, no matter how often they were re-exposed to it.  Second, and if anything even more important, recovery also conferred on them a non-specific immunity that resulted from the concerted mobilization of the immune mechanism as a whole, like a graduation ceremony for the entire system, in effect a certificate of the body's readiness and capacity to respond acutely and vigorously to whatever other viruses and bacteria might threaten it in the future.   I am reasonably certain that          I owe the good health I enjoy today, at the age of 76, in no small part to having contracted and recovered from this week-long illness, with fever and so much else, seventy years ago.

So part of what I'm saying is that we didn't really need the measles vaccine at all, because after several hundred years of experience with the virus the developed nations of Western Europe and the United States at least had learned how to deal with it quite safely and effectively, and even extracted from it huge, profound, and lasting benefits for the health of every individual and indeed of the race as a whole, such that nursing mothers gave a borrowed immunity to their infants through the milk at their most vulnerable time of life.

In short, the decision to vaccinate against the measles was not made in response to a genuine public health emergency, but rather simply to showcase the efficacy of the vaccination concept.  And this it has done quite brilliantly, it must be said, at least on the surface; for in perhaps ten years it reduced the incidence of the acute disease from about 400,000 cases annually to only a few thousand, and to considerably less than a thousand at present.  This is a truly remarkable achievement, albeit with a significant downside, as I will presently relate.   So it's interesting and rather curious why the medical and vaccine establishments don't simply claim victory at this point, and let it go at that; it's a claim that few would argue with, and everybody would be happy.   After all, everybody knows that infectious diseases come and go: new outbreaks comprising a few hundred cases from time to time are hardly surprising and certainly don't qualify as an appreciable threat to the population as a whole.

So as we listen to the news stories, we need to ask ourselves what all the fuss is about, to say nothing of the hysteria and the fanaticism that everybody seems to be caught up in around them.  The one thing I can say for sure is that it can't be about the disease, for the reasons I've already given.  A moment's thought is sufficient to provide the real answer, which lies in what the vaccine and medical establishments want to do about this major non-problem.  The punch line of all the stories consists of two clearly-articulated and closely-intertwined political agendas, which actually they have already been pushing for for decades:

            1) to blame the outbreak on the unvaccinated kids; and therefore

            2) to drum up support for new legislation to eliminate the very few across-the-board exemptions that still exist in             some states.

New laws of this type have already been proposed in three states that I know of -- Pennsylvania, California, and New Mexico -- and probably will soon be in others as well. 

Purely from the viewpoint of logic, this strategy makes no sense, not least because the few hundred cases are so insignificant in the scheme of things, as I've said.  In addition, the best way to blame the unvaccinated kids would be to broadcast as widely as possible the disproportionately large preponderance of cases in people claiming a religious or philosophical exemption.  The curious fact that they fail to provide such statistics strongly suggests that in fact the numbers point in the opposite direction, that the preponderance of cases are in the vaccinated group, just as has been true in past outbreaks in the '80's, '90's, and since; once again, it's strangely difficult to extract this information, which is exactly what you would expect state health departments to be doubly eager to give out, if their argument were correct.  In other words, by bullying the folks who are simply exercising their rights to refuse treatment for their children, they are certainly deflecting attention away from the very evidence they would need to back up their argument. 

Moreover, the vaccination rates are already well over 90% in the United States for most vaccines, and over 95% in many areas, among the very highest in the world; so it would be only natural to expect that most of the cases would occur in this group.  The obvious way to dispel such doubts would be for the reluctant health departments to simply divulge the number of vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, rather than expecting the public to accept their unsupported claim as fact.  What they are really asking is for everyone to be vaccinated, with no exceptions: here we get into the area of civil rights, namely, the right of every patient to refuse treatment, and the right of every parent to determine the health care appropriate for their children, which is why these very few and seldom-used exemptions were created in the first place.  They could of course be waived temporarily in the event of a genuine public health emergency, which these small clusters of an ordinary childhood illness most certainly are not.

Which brings me to another equally obvious point.  If the vaccine were effective in conferring a genuine immunity, similar to that acquired by coming down with and recovering from the natural disease, then the unvaccinated kids would be a threat only to themselves, which would be perfectly OK, since they made that choice.  But if the vaccine-mediated immunity falls far short of that standard, such that the immunity conferred by it is not genuine, powerful, or long-lasting, then by all means admit it, and let the people make their choice.  You can't have it both ways: simply scapegoating the people who are exercising their right to choose, and bulllying them to conform with your ideal society of perfect obedience, isn't going to wash, and it wouldn't work even if people submitted to it.  Vaccination is a trick, a simulation of immunity that is partial, temporary, and with other major downsides that I've written about elsewhere and don't even need to discuss right now.1

The immediate issue is preserving the frail remnant of personal liberty that is embodied in these tiny windows of exemption, and that the vaccine manufacturers and the doctors who serve them are bent on taking away.  I hope and pray that the American people will not let that happen.

Note.

1.  Cf. "The Case Against Immunizations" (1983), "Vaccination: a Sacrament of Modern Medicine (1991), and "Hidden in Plain Sight: the Role of Vaccines in Chronic Disease" (2005), all of which have been reprinted in my book, Plain  Doctoring: Selected Writings, 1983-2013, CreateSpace, 2013, $25.00, available from Amazon

Editor's Note: Open Media Boston is actively soliciting a response to this op-ed from a medical research scientist. Please contact info{at}openmediaboston{dot}org for more information. 

Editor's 5/10/15 Update: Unfortunately, we were unable to find a medical research scientist willing to spend the time to respond to this op-ed in a timely fashion. However, we did note the following study in Science that demonstrates quite clearly that unvaccinated children who get measles are more prone to opportunistic inflectious diseases for two to three years post-infection: Long-term measles-induced immunomodulation increases overall childhood infectious disease mortality.