It’s crucial not only for your children, but for all children.
Not long after our first daughter was born, I remember seeing her on the exam table in the doctor’s office, lying on her back, with the white paper crinkling underneath her. She was soft and small and fragile. I remember watching the needle pierce her leg, and feeling a strange mix of guilt and relief. There was a slight delay before her face changed and her scream filled the room. As a father, I cringed.
In 2006, there were rumors about mercury in the injections, and some possible link with autism. My wife and I had heard them. With the anxiety of all new parents, we wanted, more than anything, to keep our daughter from harm. But sorting through the opinions and anecdotes and research was overwhelming. We were torn between fear, belief, and trust.
Fortunately, we had a good doctor whom we did trust, who assured us that the shots didn’t contain mercury and that they posed no risk of autism. We believed her. We were too exhausted to do much more than that. Things might have been harder if we’d felt differently about our doctor, or about Western medicine, or about the world. But we didn’t. We just did our best. Today our daughter is healthy and thriving. For that we’re grateful. Yet a surprising number of new parents in my generation don’t feel the way we did. They don’t believe their doctors. And they haven’t come to see vaccinations as an obvious, logical, low-risk choice.
Part of this reluctance initially stemmed from a paper published in the medical journal the Lancet in 1998, which implied that the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine caused autism and bowel disease. The study was small, with only 12 subjects, and its results were never reproduced. The Lancet eventually retracted it. And the paper’s lead author, Andrew Wakefield, was found to have committed deliberate fraud and was barred from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom. But it was too late: A movement had started, headed by parents (some of them celebrities) who were, most of all, afraid.
Today, much more is known. There is no detectable link between vaccines and autism. Yet no matter how many studies come to this conclusion, it doesn’t seem to matter. The anti-vaccine campaign tapped into a deep anxiety about science, the world, and our place within it.
Resistance to vaccination is not a new thing: Anti-vaccination movements gained momentum in Britain in the early 1800s almost as soon as the practice was established. A backlash arose on this side of the Atlantic as well, with the formation of the Anti-Vaccination Society of America and the Anti-Vaccination League of New York City in the late 1800s. Some people simply didn’t believe vaccination worked. Some feared it caused eczema. Others felt it was un-Christian.
The word inoculate originally meant “to graft” or “implant,” from the Latin oculus, meaning “eye” or “bud.” But to many, the idea of vaccination – infecting one’s body with a sickness in order to prevent that sickness – seemed counterintuitive. And planting the “bud” from which immunity would grow frequently meant accepting a measure of risk and pain for a greater good.
The zeitgeist these days is often the opposite: to insulate, a word that comes from the Latin for “island.” That’s what many parents dream of creating when they opt not to vaccinate: an island where their child is safe from harm.
Yet by forgoing vaccinations, they are creating a different kind of island. In the wealthy school districts of Los Angeles, according to an investigation by the Hollywood Reporter, as many as 60 to 70 percent of parents have filed “personal belief exemptions” so they won’t be required to vaccinate their children. The rate of vaccination in those schools is comparable to that of Chad and South Sudan. And long-forgotten diseases such as measles are re-emerging.
Many anti-vaccination advocates argue that immunization is a personal choice that affects only them. But this decision affects our entire society. This is because of a phenomenon called “herd immunity,” which means that each additional person who is vaccinated decreases the ability of a virus to spread. At a certain threshold, the virus can’t find enough hosts to move through a population. In the best case, it goes extinct. That’s what happened with smallpox, and that’s what Rotary is working toward with the polio eradication campaign. Without vaccination, many people can contract a disease – sometimes without showing any symptoms – and then carry it to others who cannot be vaccinated because they are too young or too ill.
Eula Biss is an essayist who had a son in the early 2000s and heard the same sort of rumors my wife and I did. She did some deep research before coming down on the side of vaccination. But she remained fascinated by the cultural currents stirred up by the topic, and her investigations resulted in her book, On Immunity: An Inoculation. In it, she notes: “Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity.” The ultimate effect is to endanger the most vulnerable members of society.
Past waves of anti-vaccine movements flourished when little was known about viruses and how they spread. And while today’s movement has some aspects in common with its predecessors, Biss feels there is something different about it too – namely that it stems from a sense of powerlessness in the face of unseen toxins and pollutants and evils.
“What has been done to us,” she writes, “is that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood. As mothers, we must somehow square our power with our powerlessness. We can protect our children to some extent. But we cannot make them invulnerable any more than we can make ourselves invulnerable.”
But if we have gained some fears, we have lost others. It’s been a long time since we dealt with the reality of measles or rubella or smallpox. It’s been a long time since we lived as hunter-gatherers whose child mortality rate was 100 times the one we currently enjoy in the United States. It’s been a long time since we couldn’t just assume our child would live.
Perhaps it’s time to bring vaccination back from the personal into the public sphere. To ask who we are vaccinating for: For the young. For the old. For those weaker than ourselves. For those in future generations. For everyone.
When the question is framed this way, researchers find that people are more likely to choose vaccination. And this is as it should be, because vaccination is not a personal decision, such as what we want to eat or what we want to wear. Vaccination is not a lifestyle choice. Vaccination is not simply an individual matter. Because no matter what kind of island we feel we are on, we are on it together. — Frank Bures