There’s an old line about how if someone is a big enough skeptic, they become gullible again. The idea is that they are so eager to reject the conventional and popular opinion that they will believe anything that happens to contradict it, no matter how obviously wrong it happens to be. While there are many examples of this, it’s likely that the most prominent one at the moment is the anti-vaccine movement.
Vaccines are proven to be effective at preventing disease, they are the reason why things like smallpox are gone completely, and things like polio have largely disappeared from countries with a good vaccination coverage. They work for the same reason one only gets many diseases once, the body knows how to get rid of a disease once it recognizes it. Which isn’t to say they are perfect, the constant mutations of the flu virus mean that vaccinations against that are annual, but they have stopped deadly diseases from infecting people, especially children.
As always happens when you have conventional wisdom, someone inevitably wants to challenge it. Now, we have the anti-vaccination movement, which charges that they are somehow bad for children, using a debunked study from the ‘80s to suggest that they are linked to autism. There are a few problems with that. One, it suggests autism is worse than death, a statement I suspect all autistic people will strongly disagree with. Two, it ignores the fact that after a generation of near-universal vaccination, whatever links there might be are tenuous at best. Three, it is ignoring the health complications that many of these preventable diseases actually do cause. Take measles, for example, an outbreak of which can be directly blamed on the reduced vaccination levels among children. Complications from that disease can include brain damage or death, yet it is a disease that can be prevented entirely if there is actual vaccination occurring.
Vaccines work, this much is clear. As well, vaccines prevent diseases that cause some severe complications in people who become infected, that is also clear. So why is it that some people want to believe that they are a danger? In western countries, vaccines are so prevalent and vaccination programs so well run that we have effectively eliminated the dangers they prevented. So now that the diseases are gone, young parents don’t know what it was like to have those diseases, have friends with those diseases, or how they could ruin the lives of a young person. Combine that with a skepticism about what they are being told, they become convinced that something which saves lives is a risk again.
At the moment measles is lingering in the background, ready to start infecting people again when it has the chance and a number of susceptible bodies out there. With vaccination rates down, it’s the ideal time for the disease to start making an appearance yet again. Unfortunately, it might be needed, the disease that comes to remind anti-vaccination people that there is a reason for vaccinations, and their scientifically invalid worries about them are putting their families at risk. Instead of invented risks of vaccination we have a very real risk that comes from avoiding it, and perhaps the return of measles will remind people that there is a very real reason why vaccines are so common.
