Vaccines and Denialism

May 14, 2017
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vaccines

denialism

Denialism. According to the Oxford Dictionary, “when a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.” Something that people do, but also you obviously don’t do it yourself, because it’s just one of those things, you know?

Denialism manifests in many different forms. You might be denying that a certain event or thing is bad for you. Something simple, like believing that your car won’t start because it’s cold, not because it’s 20 years old and you haven’t exactly treated it well. Or the denial of something more extreme, like smoking or drugs - you subconsciously know it’s bad - you might even consciously know it’s bad - but you don’t want to think about it, sure maybe it causes cancer to some people but you know science isn’t always that sound and maybe it’s just a correlation and it’s only happening to some people and it hasn’t happened to me yet and the winner of the Guinness World Record for oldest man was a smoker and therefore smoking isn’t really that bad.

And of course, you’re going to ridicule the above statement. That’s something that other people do, not me! Well, recently (actually, not that recently, given that this has been going on for more than a decade), denialism has exposed itself in a very prominent (and life-threatening form): the denial of vaccines.

If you don’t live under a rock, then you’ll know that as a child, children receive booster shots as protection from diseases such as polio, Hep B, diphtheria, pertussis, and more. If you’re in tune with the controversial topics of the time, you might also know that a significant portion of the parent population has decided that vaccines are, in fact, bad for your child. Generally, this sort of rhetoric vomits from the mouth of great actors such as Jenny McCarthy, but it can come from disgraced doctors such as Andrew Wakefield. Well, actually, it kinda started with the disgraced doctor, Andrew Wakefield.

Back in 1998, Wakefield and a team of 12 co-authors published a paper in the Lancet, which - along with the JAMA - is one of the two most highly prestigious medical journals. The paper details (well, I shouldn’t really say “details”, because of the inaccuracies that I’ll later talk about) a study conducted on children who received the MMR vaccine. Later, these children developed autism. The paper received a ton of media attention, sparked an anti-vaccine movement, and as a result, MMR vaccine rates fell through the cracks. And I would say that of course it deserves attention - if the newest generation is being injected with bad toxins and poisons that cause autism, then of course we shouldn’t do that. The thing is - that’s not what’s happening. The study wasn’t really valid at all.

For one thing, the study had no control group. If you’ve ever been to science class. you’ll know that this is one big “no-no”. Secondly, the study relied on patients’ memory, which is notoriously fallible (one of the reasons why eyewitness accounts are sometimes discounted in trials). Third, the group of children studied was comprised of 12 children. 12 is a very, very small number of subjects, and certainly not enough to prove the groundbreaking claim that it made. And lastly, Wakefield had been paid the big bucks to come to this conclusion. A group of lawyers really, really wanted him to prove that the MMR vaccine had side-effects worse than what it prevented against (measles, mumps, and rubella).

Another thing you might know about science is that it needs to be reproducible. Any study, regardless of the topic, can’t be a one-time thing. It’s got to be repeated, over and over and over, by many different people. Naturally, given that the claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism is pretty severe, scientists were eager to reproduce his results. Yet, after a 1999 study of 500 children, 2001 study of 10,000 children, and a 2002 study of 537,000 children, no link was found between the MMR vaccine and autism. The other coauthors of the paper even retracted their findings, and the Lancet released a statement refuting the original findings and eventually withdrew the paper. So now the paper has been thoroughly debunked. You’d think that’d be enough to quell the vaccine-autism scare, right? Wrong.

Let’s craft a typical person who is anti-vaccine, or scared of them at the very least. Her name is Abcde (trust me, it’s a real name), and she’s a 30-year-old mom who has just had a kid. She’s heard from some of her friends that vaccines might not be so good for her kid - some friend of a friend’s kid got super sick after the required booster shot at age 2. Abcde is a bit confused and goes to her trusty friend, Google.com, and does a little bit of “research” on vaccines, and happens upon a Dr. Oz video or an anti-vaccine site masquerading as a legitimate website. And now that her brain has latched onto an idea, it’s very, very hard to change Abcde’s mind. Unless Abcde is remarkably open-minded, it will take more than just a huge amount of well-executed studies to change Abcde’s opinion. Sure, Abcde probably just wants what’s best for her kid. But her mind is made up, and the more the pediatrician argues with her, the less she trusts the pediatrician’s judgment, and the more she turns to Jenny McCarthy for help.

Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics)/YouTube

Image credit: Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics)/YouTube

This is called confirmation bias - one of the most prominent biases out there, and one of the easiest to spot in other people and hardest to erase in your own mind. When someone has an opinion, they’ll look for things that confirm what they believe, and discount things that don’t.

Abcde’s case isn’t vehemently anti-vaccine, just a confused mom who has fallen into the vaccine denialism camp. Jenny McCarthy, on the other hand, is very anti-vaccine. Sure, maybe she sometimes claims mild stuff like “We’re Not An Anti-Vaccine Movement … We’re Pro-Safe Vaccine”. And here’s the problem with that. You can’t say “I’m not anti-vax, but…” without inherently denying that vaccines are safe. To advocate for “safe vaccines” is to deny the very rigorous procedure through which all vaccines proceed. (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/infographics/journey-of-child-vaccine.html)

The thing about denialism? When a claim is proven false, people will search for another reason to deny what they deny, be it vaccines or climate change, regardless of how stupid the claim is. This is another term in psychology called “explanatory attribution”. Wait, so vaccines don’t actually cause autism? Oh, but the thimerosal within isn’t so good. Wait, the thimerosal was taken out? Oh, but my problem isn’t really with the stuff inside the vaccines, it’s just the amount of vaccines at a time, it’s gonna overload my child’s immune system. Oh, that’s kinda impossible? Well, natural immunity is better anyway, I mean, hundreds of years ago, they didn’t have vaccines and they were fine, right? Wait, most people died before age 10 and that’s not actually true because that means you’re actually getting the disease and kind of have a high chance of dying? Oh, but actually, vaccines have aborted fetuses in them. Wait, that’s one of the stupidest, most outrageous (and hilarious) reasons out there? Oh, but actually, the side effects are really bad, so I’d rather risk the disease than the side effects. Wait, the side effects are just psychological (since these effects appear when given placebos) and are far, far better than the actual disease? Well, the government is evil and trying to kill us all and doesn’t Big Pharma make a ton of money off vaccines and they’re trying to make us sick so we pay them more! Wait, if we didn’t have vaccines we would probably die a lot more than right now, and Big Pharma would have far more money than they have now? (See more: http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/ivac/resources/vaccine-cost-effectiveness.html) Oh, but… And on and on and on.

Before you say, wow, people are really stupid, consider Abcde. In general, Abcde and other anti-vaxxers, yes, even Jenny McCarthy, just want what’s best for their kid. Let’s face it - autism is scary. Autism happens randomly. Autism can suddenly change a completely functioning toddler to someone their parent no longer recognizes. There’s no cure that we know of. A child with autism will probably carry it with themselves for their entire lives. And we don’t know what causes autism. That’s why so many parents put the blame vaccines - because scientists don’t know. Your child gets a shot at age 3, and a few weeks later, the pediatrician is telling you that your child is autistic. It’s scary.

That’s why this anti-vaccination movement needs to stop and consider the facts. No, vaccines do not cause autism, and there have been plenty of studies proving this. Far too many studies, in fact - scientists and nonscientists alike have wasted time and money on this topic, when it could have been spent on so many other things. For example, finding the cause of autism. Or, developing a vaccine for malaria, for AIDs, for dengue, for chagas. Or maybe something that’s not disease-related. You know, like mitigating climate change, or stopping world hunger.

Let’s be clear: denialism is not the same thing as “healthy skepticism”. There is an infinite amount of problems we could be tackling, and we’re wasting our times, going back and forth in a debate that, in reality, shouldn’t exist.

Other Sources

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