Jenny McCarthy (Image via Wikipedia)
In an impassioned talk about vaccines and public opinion during a major conference on disease prevention in Atlanta this week, science journalist Seth Mnookin offered a new perspective on why immunizations continue to be associated with autism, despite scientific evidence that roundly rejects such link.
At the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, attended by more than 1,600 participants from 58 countries, Mnookin said the popular belief that vaccines pose health risks is due to poor communicaton between doctors and parents, vague parental insecurities, and a vocal opposition.
“The debate isn’t really about vaccines and vaccine safety at all, but about a series of other issues,” said Mnookin, who teaches science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy. “When we talk about vaccine safety and effectiveness, most of the time we’re talking about anxieties parents have about not being able to care for their chidren. We haven’t found ways to adequately address some of these issues.”
Mnookin highlighted that there is rarely a discussion in physicians offices about parents’ specific concerns about vaccines, such as their timing and spacing (the majority of vaccines are recommended before a child turns 2 years old), vaccine ingredients, and the total number of vaccines (approximately 10, which protect against 14 potentially serious infectious diseases, and are administered at several doses).
“We have to find a way to move the initial discussion about vaccines to a point where parents can actually absorb and process that information, which is back to [the period of] prenatal care. That’s when parents should become informed and educated about it,” Mnookin said.
He noted that he is working on a pilot program with Children’s Hospital in Boston to usher a culture of “office hours” for doctors, similar to the way it’s done in academia. The program would allow parents to come in without having an appointment and to have extended discussions with their pediatrician about the subtleties of vaccines and other issues, without the time constraints of a typical 15-minute doctor’s appointment.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, before 1985 the recommended immunization schedule included only seven vaccines, and today’s parents may not have heard of the newer ones, or of the serious diseases they prevent. That alone likely accounts for some parents’ uneasiness about the need for more vaccines today.
But some vaccine opponents are so vocal in their belief that vaccines are harmful that they have popularized the notion that the shots contain toxic ingredients, such as antifreeze, lead, cadmium, mercury, acetone, and even cancer-causing formaldehyde (also used to embalm). The actress Jenny McCarthy is the public face of the vaccine-autism campaign, and has argued that her son Evan’s autism was triggered by immunizations. McCarthy has rallied and appeared on numerous talk shows to publicize her views, and in 2008 was awarded the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Pigasus Award, bestowed for contributions to pseudoscience.
Commenting on autism as a rallying point, Mnookin opined that although physicians often tell parents it is not their fault if their child has been diagnosed with the condition (i.e., it could not have been caused by a vaccine they allowed), many tend to interpret it as a personal slight and may subconsciously prefer to blame the condition on vaccines.
“For a lot of parents, saying that something is genetic is as much an indictment as saying ‘You let your kids watch too much TV.’ So vaccines can be [perceived as] a proxy for blaming parents because they’re something foreign and something we don’t fully understand.”
“Issues related to childhood immunizations could be very emotional,” said Karl Ekdahl, M.D., director of public health communications at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Sweden, who also presented at the conference. Putting vaccine controversies in the context of inadequate public understanding of the science, Ekdahl noted that “perceptions of risk are at least as significant as the concrete threats.”
Comments
HDNet TV exposed the fact that while health officials continue to tell us studies show no link, the federal government has paid out millions of dollars for compensation for vaccine injuries that included autism. Seeing these children who were born healthy and were suddenly and dramatically affected by their vaccinations should give us all pause. http://www.ebcala.org/news/video
Anne Dachel, Media editor: Age of Autism http://www.ageofautism.com/
These are three recent independent studies—all raising serious question about vaccine side effects:
From the professional journal, Archives of Disease in Childhood, an international peer-reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers covering conception to adolescence, comes the study,
Early diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccination associated with higher female mortality.
http://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2012/02/13/archdischild-2011-300646.full
Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?
Neil Z Miller and Gary S Goldman
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075/
Do aluminum vaccine adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism?
http://omsj.org/reports/tomljenovic%202011.pdf
Anne Dachel, Media editor: Age of Autism
Anne, I have to admit that I was intrigued by the claimed 99% correlation between the number of deaths in the first year of life and the number of vaccinations administered during that same period reported in the second paper you cited above.
While this makes for an attention-grabbing headline (it grabbed mine), the suggested causal relationship simply does not hold up under closer examination. For the 65% of US infant deaths occurring during the first month of life, the 27 (out of 28 total) vaccinations scheduled for Months 2 – 12 can obviously not have a causative relationship.
If 65% of the deaths are occurring in children who do not live long enough to experience more than a single vaccination, how do the authors find a 99% correlation between the number of scheduled vaccinations and the number of deaths?
Clearly these is a problem here.
John,
The US vaccination schedule begins with an at-birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine.
Thus, your comment is, at best, inaccurate.
THe US is one of the only or maybe the only country that gives the Hep B vaccine day one of life. Until 2000, this vaccine had 50mcg of mercury based preservative. THe vaccine caused so much disease in the pediatric age-group that France reversed the recommendation of the vaccine for all peds. autism had the greatest jump in rates within the first 3 years after this vaccine became common practice in newborns.
um, the hep b vaccine doesn’t even contain mercury. facts. why are they so hard to understand?
Facts that you don’t understand. It was stated until 2000 there was a copious amount of mercury in the Hep B vaccine. Actually it went beyond 2000 because many of the HepB vaccines had a shelf life that went way beyond that and were still used. The one used now still has mercury, but trace amounts.
Really, your comments are at best, incorrect.
In the paper, 1-dose is considered an outlier and was not included in the correlation. Interestingly, developed countries that vaccinated the most had the highest infant mortality rates (IMR). This relationship has since been further investigated by performing an odds ratio analysis with the countries divided at the median IMR and total vaccine doses, then controlling for the following factors for each nation: (1) child poverty rates, (2) low birth weights, (3) pertussis vaccination rates, (4) breast feeding rates, (5) teenage fertility rates, (6) births out of wedlock rates, (7) age at first marriage, (8) percent of divorces with/without children involved, (9) total fertility rates, and (10) pertussis incidence rates. Although child poverty rates, pertussis vaccination rates, and teenage fertility rates were significant predictors of IMR, none of these factors lowered the partial correlation below 0.62, thus, robustly confirming the study’s findings. [
Ok, let me try to explain a little more clearly.
The paper proposes that there is a causative relationship between the death rate in the first year of life (infant mortality) and the number of vacinations given in the first year of life.
The problem with trying to draw this relationship is that 70% of children who die in the first year of life die in the first MONTH of life. These children die without having experienced the different vaccine schedules that the paper suggests is responsible for the different death rates. The only difference they do experience is +/- HBV and / or BCG at birth, and countries that provide these vaccinations are equally represented among countries with high and low infant mortality.
Knowing that A occurred before B does not prove that A caused B. But it is is compelling evidence that B did not cause A.
Toni, I believe your statement regarding HBV vaccination is incorrect.
Approximately one fourth of European countries recommend Hep B vaccination “at birth” for all infants, and another half for specified risk groups according the the Eurovac site. The Australian guidelines call for HBV vaccination “as soon as possible” after birth for all infants.
As a masters student, I hope you will recognize that chronology is one of the weakest forms of evidence for causation. One can also show a surprising high correlation between whether the NFC or AFC wins the Super Bowl in an election year and which party wins the presidency.
Ms Bark,
The day you start fact-checking is the day you will come to understand that the vaccine critics get pretty much everything wrong.
It is easy to find countries vaccination schedules on-line. Other countries vaccinate with Hep B at birth.
Also you failed to mention that after a couple of years France resumed using Hep B at birth:
http://www.euvac.net/graphics/euvac/vaccination/france.html
They did the experiment. Even with a sample size as large as France, they couldn’t measure any positive impact from not vaccinating at birth–clearly the claims of harm from Hep B at birth are wrong.
W&N
Funny Ms Meleck,
The only fact I see is that you aren’t interested in what toxicologists have to say about the mercury in vaccines.
How many agree with your POV? Wouldn’t that be zero?
W&N
Facts have a pro-public health bias.