Moving the Needle

sixty years of taking vaccines for granted

Some people (not naming any names) find themselves in the awkward position of not being able to send their children to school in the state where they live. Not just public school: all schools. From daycare to college, public to private to parochial. In California, New York, Connecticut and Maine, if your child is unvaccinated and does not have a medical exemption, it’s homeschool or move to a different state.

In Maine, medical exemptions are given only to the immune compromised and to children who have already had a severe reaction to a vaccine. If your sibling has had a severe reaction to a vaccine, that does not give you a medical exemption. You will have to have your own severe reaction in order to get that.

Your doctor cannot simply write a letter saying that s/he feels vaccines would, for genetic or other health reasons, be potentially hazardous to your child’s health. This letter will be ignored, if received by an unsympathetic school nurse. The doctor can write you a full vaccine exemption, but if s/he does, the unsympathetic school nurse will likely flag your doctor for review by the state medical board, which may choose to take away your doctor’s license.

That is the state of things in the state of Maine. I can’t imagine New York, Connecticut or California are much different.

The problem isn’t the school nurse - the unsympathetic ones are merely following the letter of the law, as stated by the state. The problem is the paradigm - the set of assumptions that made it possible for a law to be passed which bars non-compliant children from school for the threat of diseases that kill fewer people, in the United States, than sharks or softballs do each year.

shark - softball

This paradigm - the assumption that vaccines are modern medicine’s greatest achievement - has crept into public consciousness in the 60-odd years since most vaccines were introduced.

But it’s strange, because history - the numbers - don’t support the paradigm. When my grandmother was in medical school at Cornell in 1906 (she didn’t stick to it - couldn’t take the cadavers), the death rate from measles in the United States was roughly 10 deaths per 100,000 individuals. Fifty-four years later, in 1960 - two years before the introduction of the measles vaccine - the death rate had fallen by around 98%, to .24 deaths per 100,000 individuals. Here is a handy chart which tells a similar story for a number of infectious diseases - all of the mortality rates fell to near-zero before the introduction of any vaccines, and the mortality rates continued to fall in a similar arc after the vaccines were introduced:

This chart is from Roman Bystrianyk’s Substack, and his book (with Suzanne Humphries) Dissolving Illusions. In it, the authors outline how the Industrial Revolution, with it’s horrendous nutrition and sanitation, was a nadir for public health - and high death rates for common diseases reflected this. The improvements in sanitation and nutrition in the first half of the twentieth century caused a steady decline in mortality, and a lessening of severity of the diseases.

The vaccines - which are commonly given credit for greatly reducing mortality for the “diseases of childhood” - only came on the scene after mortality rates had already fallen by more than 95%.

I don’t think that, if people actually understood this, they would be likely to panic about a measles outbreak in Disneyland, or Texas, or a Hasidic Jewish community in New York.

And I don’t think they would consider an unvaccinated child a threat to public health, if they understood that the disease in question was well on the way to being eradicated before the vaccine was ever introduced.

I don’t know - truly - what accounts for all the heat around the question of vaccines. For me, vaccines were initially a concern because I felt uncomfortable with the risk of an anaphylactic reaction, however slight, for my child. When I looked into it further, I learned that severe reactions weren’t the only concern: neurological issues, allergies and autoimmune disorders had all increased in proportion to the great rise in the number of vaccines administered to children since the early 1980’s.

The fourteen shots that I received as a child have increased to more than seventy. Can I repeat that in case you missed it? Children in the United States are now given over 70 doses of vaccines - some single and some in combo-shots, following the recommended schedule provided by the CDC.

To me, this seems like a poor idea.

For a child to go to school in Maine, they would have to receive a MINIMUM of around 32 doses of vaccines, and I would prefer to not have these administered to my children. (Other families may, of course, do as they see fit.)

I guess the Great Danger is that unvaccinated children will ruin public health by inspiring others not to get vaccinated, subsequently plummeting the vaccination rate and destroying “herd immunity”. But herd immunity against what? Diseases that were no longer a significant threat, even before the introduction of the vaccines?

These people, who voted to not allow my unvaccinated children to attend any school, daycare program or college in the state of Maine - these people are my friends. My neighbors. The helpful folks at the local hardware store. I can’t imagine that they meant us any particular harm. I think they thought they were doing the right thing.

Silly as it was.

I don’t know whether the fact of RFKJ in the White House is helping the situation, considering all the heat around the topic. People who believe in “vaccines are medicine’s greatest achievement” tend to get riled by him, I think. And when people get riled, there’s really no talking to them.

Though… the recent developments in Florida and West Virginia might suggest a bit of a shift of public opinion. At least in those two places. Whether that will translate to my children being allowed to attend school this year - that I do not know.

I just hope that, beyond the heat and the noise and the panic, there is a space for people to consider things like charts and history.

A portrait of my grandmother, probably painted around 1960.