Between Hope and Fear
Kindle Highlights
history of vaccines alongside the history of deadly pathogens and the role they’ve played in human history (toppling empires as well as causing intense heartbreak and loss on individual levels)
This book conveys a story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and the national and global implications of poor decision making, often by a relatively small number of highly educated and powerful elites.
This vulnerability has been greatly increased through the intentional fraud of one man, Andrew Wakefield, who has a dubious track record full of inaccurate research methodologies and error-prone data analysis.
The 18th-century discovery of the vaccine laid the groundwork for a Herculean task two centuries later to utterly eradicate the disease from the planet, an achievement that arguably surpasses all other human achievements.
The rise of activism against vaccines is not a story of intended malevolence. Quite the opposite; the motives for avoiding vaccination are based on agonizing fears of a different spectrum of diseases, those associated with autism.
Like virtually all types of medicines or any other product one can envision, vaccines wear out. As we grow older and gain experience with an expanding number of foreign microbial intruders, the immune system can focus less and less on any individual pathogen (or vaccine), particularly those last boosted years or decades before. Eventually, it becomes a “use it or lose it”
The rising volume of vaccine denial, which tends to focus on the refuted link between vaccination and autism, has generated a self-propagating meme that has increased the tenor and virulence of conversation about the need for proper vaccination. The volume and advocacy of false facts by an obnoxious and loud minority has overwhelmed the fact-based attempts by credible sources to expound the extraordinary health benefits of vaccination.
To properly understand the impact of vaccines, it is necessary to recall the devastation wrought by infectious diseases before the invention of the vaccine. Going back as far as ancient Egypt, we rediscover the history of various infectious diseases, starting with smallpox. This disease shared the nefarious property of being both highly infectious and comparably deadly and likely killed more humans throughout history than any other cause.
The risk is not indeed any of these pathogens but instead reflects a knowing and intentional decision to avoid or delay vaccination against childhood and adult diseases. Many of the nation’s most elite, wealthy, and progressive minds suffer from a false sense of believing they have special insight into truth. They have knowingly jeopardized themselves, their children, communities, and their country by exposing them to life-changing injury and death.
My charge at this company also included the development of medical countermeasures for Marburg virus, Rift Valley fever virus, chikungunya virus, Lassa fever virus, dengue fever virus, and pandemic influenza viruses, all of which have been implicated both as bioterrorist weapons and as naturally occurring events. To paraphrase one of my former CEOs, a past head of the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “Mother Nature is a most dangerous and inventive terrorist.”
The slow decay in the ability of the immune system to recall recognition of pathogens is compounded by a phenomenon discussed among vaccinologists and referred to as “the herd effect” (or social immunity). Sparing the reader the agonizing details and mathematical modeling that distinguishes the field of epidemiology, the herd effect can be visualized as a protective shield that arises when a large fraction of a population is rendered insensitive to a particular infection. If enough of “the herd” (or any community of individuals) is adequately protected, then even the unprotected will find a safe harbor from that pathogen.
issue. Despite the technical accuracy of such responses, the messages conveyed by the anti-vaccinators continue to resonate with the key demographic, including educated and affluent parents. The consequences of the failure to follow through with keeping current with childhood vaccination recently passed a tipping point that could threaten the health of our nation if not reversed. In fact, I was in part motivated to write this book upon learning of an outbreak of mumps at nearby University of Missouri. Similar outbreaks have been documented at Harvard, Yale, the University of Washington, and many other institutions over the past year.
In recalling the first time their child demonstrated overt symptoms of autism, many parents linked the disease with a recent vaccination, particularly when prompted to do so. However, pediatric vaccination schedules are about as ubiquitous as white box trucks in metropolitan Washington and about as relevant to the investigation of the causes of autism. Nonetheless, the belief in the vaccine connection is often staunchly defended and perhaps represents a tangible source for blame by frustrated and devastated parents. Such is the genesis of a challenge that has furthered the magnitude of the overall pain of autism by promoting an avoidance of vaccines in a misguided attempt to protect children. Instead, these choices have endangered not only their own children but also their friends, siblings, neighbors, and, if allowed to fester, quite possibly the entire nation’s health.