Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America

Conclusion

Conclusion I have concerns about the modern American vaccine schedule, and I am persuaded by some of the evidence launched against the scientific and medical communities. Because of this, I am willing to become a belligerent in the modern American vaccine debate, but not one who lines up on one side or the other. I dismiss the all-or-nothing approach to vaccines that both extremes push on me. As a parent and a scholar who has examined the claims made by the parties in the debate, I hold that all parents need a new way to think about their children’s vaccinations. I do not accept much of what I hear advocated by the alternative health community, the libertarian critics of vaccine policy, or the anti-vaccinators in general. It is foolish to hold up notions of “natural” as being inherently superior to man-made alternatives. I will tell anyone who wants to adopt what they naively imagine to be a holistically natural lifestyle that (thankfully) technology and culture make it impossible to return to the state of nature that was known to our Paleolithic ancestors. We can, at best, justify choices about how we want to live based on a combination of scientific, moral, theological, economic , and political aspirations. I categorically reject as egotistically libertarian any claim that no one has a right to compel us to do anything with our bodies. We live in an interconnected community and are intensely reliant on one another, a situation that forces us to submit to a multitude of concessions as we balance the pragmatic demands of sharing the earth with the rest of humankind. Finally, I reject anti-vaccinators’ core assertion that vaccines represent a dangerous insult to our bodies and that we would be better off without them. I believe, as public health authorities claim, that vaccines represent one of the most effective tools in advancing both individuals’ health and the public’s health. All that being said, I agree with many of the claims made by critics of the modern vaccine schedule. First, I accept the primacy of an individual’s responsibility as a parent in making medical decisions for his or her children. In weighing the benefits and risks associated with vaccines, parents’ primary Conclusion 173 responsibility is to the health and well-being of their children, rather than to the common good. The public and individual benefits cannot be disentangled from one another, of course. But as exemplified by Sybil Carlson, the woman who told the New York Times that she refused vaccination because “I refuse to sacrifice my children for the greater good,” they are not interchangeable. I appreciate the willingness of vaccine critics to question the wisdom of blindly following the advice of the priests of modern science and technology. Countless examples of wrong-headed therapies and dangerous drugs should temper our confidence in the current state of medical knowledge and practice . Science and technology allow us tremendous power to improve the human condition, but they alone cannot make us happy, healthy, or good. Science and technology—and their practitioners—necessarily operate within a complex set of social, cultural, political, and economic systems. The claims offered by scientists and physicians must be weighed against a myriad of other, sometimes competing, claims and values. Indeed, science is not enough. Finally, I see in much of the rhetoric attacking the modern vaccine schedule an underlying frustration with the condition of medical care in the United States today. Overburdened doctors and nurses, crowded waiting rooms, tremendously expensive insurance, massive profits made by pharmaceutical companies, and an elaborate maze of bureaucracy separating ill patients from the people who are expected to help them all have combined to alienate many parents from the medical establishment. Moreover, although medicine is cloaked in altruistic language, it is a business. One need not be a behavioral economist to understand that we can expect certain problems to accompany any profit-making enterprise. Within this context, we have to admit that the debates over mandatory vaccines and parents’ anxieties about them are only partially about science and medicine. Much like recent debates over global climate change, stem cell research, and the teaching of evolution in public schools, the modern American vaccine controversy is a cultural and a political debate. No scientific finding and no agreement among physicians and scientists can possibly bring it to a close. Scientific findings alone cannot end this debate, because the central questions in the debate are inherently political: Who...