Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America

Introduction

Introduction Over the past decade, American parents have become increasingly anxious about following their pediatricians’ recommendations to fully vaccinate their children. As a result, about 40 percent of American parents today have chosen to delay certain vaccines or outright refuse to allow their children’s physicians to vaccinate their children with one or more of the recommended or mandated vaccines. Their anxieties arise from several sources, but the most widely discussed concern among parents is the claim that vaccines may cause autism. Despite assurances from every mainstream scientific and medical institution that vaccines do not cause autism, millions of parents fear that they do, and it shapes their decisions about whether and when to vaccinate their children. The modern American debate over vaccines and autism is a proxy debate. It is a debate in which both sides uphold claims that are simplistic stand-ins for real problems. Underlying parents’ fears about a link between vaccines and autism are a complex set of concerns about the modern vaccine schedule that they rarely articulate clearly. Health officials prefer to debate within the limited terms of the claim that vaccines cause autism, because it frames the debate in terms that are familiar to them and because the autism question keeps the controversy within the confines of their scientific and technical expertise . It also allows health officials to avoid admitting that many of the concerns of parents are not scientific in nature, and thus scientists and physicians can have only a limited say in alleviating them. This book is an account of the emergence of the modern American vaccine controversy. It reveals that, while the polemicists have debated within the confines of the vaccines-cause-autism argument, serious real problems with the current vaccine regime remain unresolved. These problems are discussed in detail in the book’s final chapter. For now, it is enough to say that the debate about vaccines and autism obscures serious problems—some inherent to the vaccines themselves and some unintentionally generated over the last several decades—that animate parents’ anxieties about vaccines. The 2 Vaccine entire process is conducted under substantial time and financial pressures; so many shots are given at such a young age against so many obscure diseases without parents’ having a clear understanding of why we are vaccinating against certain diseases and not others. No reasonable person ought to be surprised that the process has created apprehension among thoughtful parents. This is not a history of bogeymen conjured by parents who simply distrust modern science, nor is it a story of how scientists and physicians have silenced quacks. It is a description of how, lacking a clear long-term vision, we have drifted into a situation in which vaccines, one of the most effective tools in the public health arsenal, have become the source of tremendous angst among the very people charged with the power to allow pediatricians to vaccinate children against deadly and debilitating ailments. As we continue to add more and more new vaccines to the already long list of recommended and mandated vaccines, we are priming ourselves for a breakdown of parents ’ trust in vaccines and in mainstream medicine generally. For Her Own Good My interest in the modern American vaccine debate emerged on April 6, 2006, when my first child, Annabelle, was born. That same day, USA Today published an advertisement claiming that the 6,000 percent increase in autism that Americans had witnessed during the 1990s was the result of the “ambitious immunization schedule” that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had adopted. The advertisement claimed that the CDC had more than tripled the number of vaccines required for children before they started kindergarten. Several parent groups, each of which focused in some way on the relationship between vaccines and autism, sponsored the advertisement. They demanded the complete elimination of mercury from all vaccines and a reevaluation of the combined effects of the nearly three dozen mandated and recommended vaccines that children received by the time they were six years old. A few hours after her first breath, Annabelle received her first vaccination, half a milliliter of Merck’s Recombivax HB, which promised to prevent her from contracting hepatitis B. The nurse explained that Annabelle would either get the shot that day or she would get it three days later, when we took her to her first pediatrician appointment. The benefit of getting it now, she said, was [3.12.161.77] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10:43...