Vaccinations don’t cause autism
A hoax from the 90s has caused people to die
As literally a ten minute read of Wikipedia will tell you, vaccinations do not cause autism. The whole controversy started due to a fraudulent paper published in 1998 in The Lancet by the (now-discredited) physician Andrew Wakefield. His paper argued that the MMR vaccine could be linked to disorders including autism, (but not, however, that it proved the association — it merely recommended further research) and Wakefield himself said at a press conference that use of the triple MMR vaccine should be suspended until further research had been done. Since, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, the NHS, and the Cochrane Library have all found precisely no evidence linking the MMR vaccine to autism.
It was later revealed in a famous Telegraph article by Brian Deer that Wakefield had multiple conflicts of interest, including having received a substantial sum of money from an organisation hoping for evidence against vaccine manufacturers. Deer revealed how deep the scandal went: Wakefield had changed the results of some of his findings, and the originals were published; Wakefield had simply lied about the conditions some of the children had; and some of the parents interviewed in his studies were involved in the group attempting to sue the vaccine manufacturers. Since, ten of twelve of Wakefield’s authors have withdrawn support for the study, and he himself was removed from the UK medical register and banned from practising medicine. (Again, all of this information is available on Wikipedia, and it’s all sourced.)
And yet, this fraudulent paper has had an effect on British society that has had great costs — it’s literally caused people to die. Immunisation dropped vastly in the years following the paper — in the UK, nearly twenty percent. In 2000 in Ireland, three people died from around 1,500 reported cases of measles, and in 2008, another teenager in the UK died due to measles who already had an immunodeficiency. In 2013, a measles outbreak in Wales (mostly Swansea) led to the hospitalisation of 88 people from nearly 1,500 who caught the infection, and one person died. Across the rest of Europe, perhaps hundreds, if not thousands, have died due to not being properly vaccinated, from the Netherlands to Romania.
Not to mention the monetary cost Wakefield’s paper has had: literally millions has been spent due to the hospitalisation of people who would never have caught measles had they had their vaccinations. A 2011 paper said ‘the alleged autism-vaccine connection is, perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years’, and Bill Gates said in an interview with CNN ‘the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children.’ (I don’t know why Bill Gates has the expertise to speak on this matter, but he seemed like a good name to get into my post.)
So why do people believe it? Well, part of it is because the anti-vax movement isn’t something that has only existed since 1998, but is hundreds of years old and is (surprise, surprise) linked to religion, specifically to Christianity. Some clergy argued back in the 18th century that, because parts of animals were used in the vaccines, it was a violation of religious principles — presumably, keeping human blood pure, though I imagine they had no problem killing animals and eating them. Others argued that mandatory vaccines were a violation of personal liberties, an argument which is still whipped out today when governments consider the possibility of making vaccinations obligatory, as some did after the 1998 hoax. In the late 1800s in Stockholm, a smallpox epidemic began, also caused in large part by religious concerns around vaccinations.
Of course, it isn’t only due to religion that anti-vax is a relatively big movement right now. Public figures such as Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Donald Trump (wow! rly?! r u sure? he said smthn like that? but hes usually so reasonable…) also make ludicrous arguments about the dangerous of vaccines that have no basis in science or reality, and the sway they have has to be considered. The anti-vax movement has parallels in the flat Earth movement (and other ludicrous conspiracy theories) which, incidentally, does come directly from something in the Bible; but at least anti-vaxxers have a reason for their scepticism, rather than it simply being based on superstition. Much of it stems from a wider distrust of the government interfering with people’s lives. Some of those who were against SB 277, a very controversial bill in California which mandated that children must be fully vaccinated in order to enrol in schools and daycare, argued against it not because they believed vaccination caused autism, or even because they thought children shouldn’t be vaccinated, but because of libertarian arguments that parents should be able to make their own decisions about how their children are medically treated. Of course, the children themselves don’t have any say if they are vaccinated or not, and therefore whether they are more likely to get sick or not. Other anti-vax arguments revolve around suspicion that pharmaceutical companies are just there to make profits — which, to an extent, is true. But the government has a stake in whether children get sick or not; why would they want your child to get autism? Wouldn’t that cost the state more, particularly in the United Kingdom, where healthcare is free at the point of use?
It’s all very confusing. And other anti-vax arguments are just as ridiculous. The HPV vaccine, which can help prevent cervical cancer, was embroiled in controversy in the news for many of the same reasons that anti-vaxxers usually spout (two children died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a rare neurological disorder, some time after getting the vaccine; the Institute of Medicine found no link, despite parents’ hysteria), with the addition of this one: some parents thought it might encourage sexual activity too early, as it was being given to girls once they’d turned eleven. Are people really so terrified of their children having sex that they will prevent them from receiving something which allows them to have safer sex? Evidently, yes. As a 2014 paper argued, ‘the reality is that young people engage in risky sexual behavior that can have devastating effects on their health well into adulthood.’ No shit. However, in both control groups and those who ̶s̶u̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ experienced abstinence-based sexual education, the percentage of those who had had a sexual encounter before the age of fifteen was the same. The reality is that your children are going to shag, and setting them up to have the safest, healthiest sex possible is the only solution. And, moreover, there are other things that could cause HPV which, while we don’t ever want to think about them, need to be taken into consideration: that children could get raped or otherwise sexually abused and thereby infected. Obviously it’s better that they are protected.
Another part of the reason the anti-vax movement has managed to gain steam is because we have such easy access to information these days, although on the face of it, that sounds like a solution. The media widely reported Wakefield’s initial paper and, if all the news sources are reporting the same results from a single study, and if his press conference is getting so much attention, of course people are going to get scared. Now, though, anyone can log on to the internet (not that you’ve had to log in since the old dial-up days) and very quickly find a wealth of evidence from respectable scientific circles which all but proves that vaccines don’t cause autism. The problem, though, is that you can also open up Google Chrome and find plenty of websites which offer (pseudoscientific) evidence to the contrary, from unreliable sources, often taking their information from the same debunked paper published over twenty years ago.
One could talk about the fake news phenomenon and the emergence of our so-called ‘post-truth’ era (that term’s gone into disuse, hasn’t it?), but that wouldn’t explain anti-vaccination movements —at least, not entirely. The movement has been strong for longer than this ‘era’ has been about, but it seems that distrust in vaccines does have a wider societal background. In the US, the largest proportion of parents who chose to only partially or not at all vaccinate their children are white, educated, and middle-class. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Mark Sawyer, a paediatric infectious disease specialist, suggested that these parents ‘don’t reject modern medicine’ but ‘have gotten on this theme of distrust of the information that’s being provided’. People are in general distrustful of the information they are receiving — that’s been obvious from the political climate of the West over the last decade or so.
But efforts to mitigate this with education don’t seem to be working. Some argue that good rhetoric — the ability to make a fluent argument for science and its validity — is the way to convince people. In Europe, workshops have been taking place to try and health public help officials better educate the public on these issues, and therefore mitigate any further health scares. Lots of this comes down to complex psychology. In order to refute an argument, one has to reiterate it; even if you convince someone that the argument is false, the mere act of repeating it can reinforce people’s belief in it. Therefore, these workshops try and get practitioners to not mention the pseudoscience while they refute it — not an easy task. The workshops also teach other psychological techniques like managing people’s expectations of how safe something is going to be, refuting false logic and debunking conspiracy theories. Still, a scarily large minority of parents don’t want their children to be vaccinated across much of the Western world, and changing opinions is a tough process, one that doesn’t seem to be happening if the recent HPV controversy is anything to go by.
In the end, the biggest problem with the anti-vax movement isn’t that the children of anti-vaxxers are at risk, but that they put others at risk, too. Smallpox, which killed many, many people in the past, was declared to have been eradicated worldwide in the 1970s precisely due to vaccination. If this hadn’t have happened, people infected with smallpox would infect others, and more people would have died — that’s pretty obvious. The same thing happens when children catch measles, and other children who do have the vaccine are exposed to them — even having had the vaccine doesn’t mean you’re 100% safe from getting the infection, but it does mean your body stands a much better chance of not getting it. According to the NHS, after one dose of the MMR, perhaps one in ten children are still at risk; after the second dose, this number falls to less than one in a hundred. We’re all fighting for our NHS to be saved right now, but there are still some who don’t believe the evidence it presents. If the National fucking Health Service is lying to us, we really can’t trust anyone. As for me, if I ever have kids, they’ll be getting all their vaccinations as soon as possible — not just for their sake, but for the sake of other people’s children, too.
