Paul Offit is one of America’s most-hated scientists. He’s been called a “biostitute” for the pharmaceutical industry and been threatened with death for his advocacy of one of medicine’s greatest innovations: vaccines. In recent years, anti-vaccine sentiment has spread like, well, an epidemic, with frightening results. In 2004, there were 26,000 reported pertussis (whooping cough) cases in the U.S., up from only 1,000 in 1976. A new article in Wired profiles Offit’s crusade and the interesting risk psychology of the anti-vaccine movement. Offit’s mission is really a mission to educate parents about the true risks their children face: “The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk. It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.” [%comments]
No Vaccine? A Different Risk
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I’m all for this. Now if we could convince creationists to only use medicines effective against diseases that existed no later than 100 years ago, we’d be set.
On one hand, there isn’t much difference between denying your child a vaccine and denying them a blood transfusion, or choosing prayer instead of medical care, or a dozen other “choices” parents make that end up hurting their kids.
But on the other hand (and pointed out time and time again), skipping vaccines isn’t just a personal choice. It creates an externality on everyone around you by increasing the risk of infection.
Isn’t actually a problem of the individual vs society?
If a parent chooses not to vaccinate their children, they are actually relying on their neighbor children’s vaccinations to protect their family. No one would get measles if everyone else couldn’t get sick. In other words, individuals can practice bad behavior but are protected by the correct behavior of others.
The contradiction is that the more people that skip vaccinations, the more society is at risk. We go through cycles of epidemics due to rising and falling awareness of these risks.
See for instance San Diego in early 2008. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5708a3.htm. This American Life did a nice piece on this as well. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=370
What are you all getting vaccination’s for in the U.S.? Here in Europe, we have large vaccination programs for tetanus and swine flue, and no one makes objections to that…
@ #1 Bob:
Any evidence to prove that? Its easy to toss out wild claims without any proof. How about the hordes of studies showing that vaccines are low risk, or the multiple examples just in that article of vaccinaction rates dropping and death rates from infectous diseases skyrocketing?
Its also interesting for me to note that, in my experience, the anti-vaccine crowd is also heavily pro-government healthcare. Interesting that the government is 1. Trying to poison us with vaccines and 2. Is the best person to adminster our health care.
I have to disagree with some of the articles assumptions:
“This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design”
Baloney. That’s exactly what it is.
“counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth”
Can we move away from this misconception that someone who is “highly educated” is intelligent? Many college degrees, even postgraduate, are no more difficult than high school was. I know several people who refuse to have their children vaccinated due to autism “risk”. All of them have degrees in things like journalism or international relations. None of the engineers I know are doing this.
The problem with people not getting vaccinated is that there are people in society who can not get vaccines, and who must rely on herd immunity. For example, newborns. A baby in Australia recently died of whooping cough because the herd immunity in her town was low due to anti-vax sentiments. This is not a “Darwin Award” scenario: her parents wanted to vaccinate her but couldn’t because she was still too young to receive the vaccine.
Excellent article, thanks for the link.
I certainly support vaccinations and find it very disturbing that the anti-vaccination crowd has to resort to threats and lies when science does not support their ‘beliefs’.