Vaccinating Children: "But that causes autism."

Strap in for this one, friends... it's going to be a long and bumpy ride.

The New York Times posted a video in February 2015 that offered a bold, yet entirely validated, question: "How did we get to this point where personal belief is more powerful than science?" This came as the result of a record number of measles cases being reported in a two month period when the virus made its way through the Disney Land theme park in Anaheim, California.

Because the number of measles cases has risen steadily over the past 15 years, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has begun taking significant strides to persuade parents to vaccinate their children against harmful diseases that continue to be some of the leading causes of death among children globally.

The blame? Well, there are multiple offenders.

We could blame the government for failing to establish an overarching law that mandates vaccination for eligible children. We could blame Andrew Wakefield, the physician who first published research linking autism to vaccination, for ever driving this fear in the first place. We could blame Jenny McCartney, the actress whose son became autistic following vaccination, for the numerous books she's published and television appearances she's made in the attempt to keep parents from vaccinating their own children. We could blame schools or parents or the media.

We could blame every single person in this world who fails to acknowledge the reality: That there is no danger to vaccination.

But I'm not going to do that. Blame, at this point, won't help anyone. So rather than focus my efforts on that, I'm going to go back to the New York Times quote mentioned before, "How did we get to this point where personal belief is more powerful than science" and I'm going to express, with the utmost passion, why both personal belief and the science surrounding vaccination should go hand-in-hand for every member of our society.

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Where it all started

We can't get anywhere in this conversation without mentioning Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield was a British gastroenterologist and medical researcher who became the first physician to ever speak against vaccination. He published a paper in The Lancet (a UK medical journal) titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" (what a mouth full). The paper made a now-discredited claim that there is a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination (MMR) and the presence of autism and bowel disease (though no one mentions the latter).

There were many problems with this study.

For one, it involved a sample size of 12. Let's just think about that for a minute... the first study to ever show a connection between autism and vaccination, the first study to ever drive persistent fear and destructive thinking of this magnitude over something so decided, only drew data from 12 people. There is currently no statistical test that can validate a finding which only involves a sample size of 12. And I would be willing to bet that most people wouldn't change even basic daily behavior (such as what brand of dog food they buy) based on the hearsay of something involving 12 individual specimen. Yet, because of Wakefield’s study, parents refuse their children potentially life-saving injections.

This problem is indisputable, but even if we were to ignore it, consider these findings:

Every other researcher in the world that tried to validate his findings failed to do so.
Financial conflicts of interest were discovered involving the study.
Nearly every co-author of the study withdrew their support for its interpretation of the data.
The British General Medical Council filed official allegations against Wakefield for subjecting his minor participants to unnecessary and invasive medical procedures without ethical approval from an institutional review board.

Wakefield lost everything. In addition to his paper being retracted by The Lancet, he lost his license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom. And has since been regarded as one of the biggest phonies in medical research for this generation.

Despite all of this, the power of Wakefield's deceit cannot be understated. He is the foundation for all of the fear and hysteria surrounding vaccinations today - the reason children continue to die from preventable illness.

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Where we stand

In the midst of all this negativity, I have good news: Things are better.

Despite the misguidance of Wakefield and the outspokenness of many individuals and organizations against vaccination, the majority of the country seems content with inoculating their children. That said, the past two years have cast a shadow on vaccinations (and the diseases they work to prevent). And if they are any indication, the country as a whole could be backsliding on this very relevant issue.

According to the CDC (2016), in 2015, 189 people from 24 states and the District of Columbia were reported to have measles. In 2014, the U.S. experienced a record number of measles cases, including 667 confirmed in 27 states. This was the greatest number of cases since the disease was considered eradicated in 2000. In addition, the CDC found that "the majority of people who got measles were unvaccinated.

The reasons parents choose to not vaccinate their children are unremarkable. But even so it's hard to judge a parent who feels they are doing what's best for their child.

Actress Jenny McCartney has taken on the scientific and medical communities for over a decade by insisting that vaccination is what gave her son, Evan, autism. She has made television appearances, written books and funded causal organizations all with the intent of keeping parents from making her "mistake."

When told, in a televised interview that her argument had no basis in science, McCartney responded, "My science is named Evan and he's at home. That's my science."

I'm going to be 100 percent transparent right now: I don't know what it's like to have a child - I don't know what McCartney went through when she saw her son fall into a crippling psychiatric illness. But there is more transparency that should be noted here than just mine: McCartney doesn't know what it's like to lose her child to a preventable biomedical infection.

Most of the children who attracted measles in 2015 did so as a result of visiting Disney Land. That’s it. They went to Disney Land. They took a vacation with their families that should have meant making memories they looked back on and smiled and laughed about forever. Instead, it will be remembered as a time when over 100 children contracted an infection that could have very easily killed them.

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Where we want to be

It is unlikely (if you were born in modern-day America) that you've ever seen someone die of measles or diphtheria; of whooping cough or tuberculosis. It's unlikely that you have seen someone bedridden from rubella or in a wheelchair as a result of polio. Needles are scary. Death and disease are scarier. We don't understand the dangers of NOT vaccinating because our generation has never truly experienced these diseases as a prevalent problem in our society. Likewise, we do understand the (supposed) dangers OF vaccinating because of an implicit bias bread in the media of a link between autism and vaccination that has no foundation in medical science.

You've heard all of the bad bias toward vaccination. So, now, I'll leave you with a good bias; with a story that is rarely ever told - the story of what can happen when your child isn't vaccinated.

Mariah Bianchi, a nurse, lost her seventeen-day old son to whooping cough. He was too young to be inoculated and after coming into contact with another individual who had not been vaccinated, he contracted the disease. He went into cardiac arrest and could not be revived.

"What does it take?" Bianchi asked. "How many times do you have to tell people or talk about it? We all have a role in helping each other, to protect each other. A vaccine preventable disease should not have killed my son."

The reality is that vaccinations are safe. We have supported that claim over and over and over again. Yet, 14 states reported less than 88 percent of kindergarten students as being vaccinated at the start of the 2013-2014 school year. This number is too low to protect even everyday healthy children let alone those with compromised immune systems or conditions and age restrictions which prevent them from being vaccinated. We have a responsibility to every member of our society to actively work at preventing deadly diseases from ever becoming prevalent in our country again.

The first step in solving any problem is admitting that the problem exists. The problem here is that personal belief has become more powerful than science. And that reality is threatening the most vulnerable population of people in our world... it's threatening our children.

Vaccinating Children: "But that causes autism."

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