Concerned, caring parents make the decision every day to forego life-saving immunity by refusing to vaccinate their children, truly believing they are doing the right thing. They do not perceive an imminent risk to their child from the older contagious diseases, focusing instead on the low—or often non-existent but ballyhooed—risks of vaccinations.
The Daily Show recently gawked at these kinds of parents—most of them well-educated and on both ends of the political spectrum—who refuse to vaccinate their children, thereby denying a consensus of scientific evidence and increasing the risk for further outbreaks. "Oh my God. Wealthy, white, liberal enclaves are at risk!" declares correspondent Samantha Bee, mocking the anti-vaccine bloggers and activists. So too at risk are some conservative Christian church communities where vaccination rates are low.
As clever the satire may be, I can't bring myself to laugh or crack a smile. Now in my 60s, I remember the illnesses brought on by these diseases before vaccines. As a physician, I've seen cases of them coming back with fatal consequences.
Maybe some of us have forgotten or are too young to realize the severity of these conditions. Healthcare providers who haven't had firsthand experience with these contagious diseases don't always think of them when confronted with classic signs and symptoms. But it's only been a little over 50 years since vaccinations became routine for childhood killers like tetanus, diphtheria, polio, measles, mumps, and pertussis, or whooping cough. Americans growing up before then had no choice but to suffer through childhood infectious diseases as they quickly spread through a community.
Most of us survived our illnesses, rewarded for our affliction with permanent natural immunity. Others suffered lifelong consequences: paralysis from polio, deafness from rubella, sterility from mumps. Some did not survive at all. My father nearly died at age 41 from a case of the mumps I brought home from school. As an infant, my sister-in-law almost didn't pull through when she turned blue from pertussis infection.
Today, I've seen healthy people develop encephalitis and pneumonia from chicken pox. A fit college student in my practice died of influenza within a week of the start of his symptoms. Our herd-immunity for many vaccine-preventable conditions has been waning, as reports of pertussis, measles, mumps, and chicken pox remerge, in affluent countries with robust health care systems. Just a couple weeks ago, the Washington Post penned an editorial encouraging readers to vaccinate against measles. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday (May 29) that there have already been more cases this year, 288, than in any full year this century," they wrote.
Parents who opt to leave their children unvaccinated contribute to the recent outbreaks. Well-meaning American parents are convinced they are doing the best thing by protecting their children from potentially rare and often unproven vaccine side effects. Some Christian parents claim vaccine risks are unwarranted, since God will provide the needed immunity if their children gets sick. (A Texas megachurch was blamed for an outbreak that infected at least 20 people with measles last year, and a Christian school in British Columbia was the epicenter for an outbreak of over 400 cases this spring.)
As the Post editorial mentioned, most cases originate overseas, so it's especially critical that Americans be vaccinated when traveling outside the U.S., even to Europe. (Those who serve in mission fields are particularly vulnerable, and I've found it interesting that previously unvaccinated Christians are more than willing to accept immunizations when they know they will be exposed.)
A Christian physician, I tell parents God indeed provides immunity. But as we've seen over millennia, it comes by very real suffering through a potentially fatal disease. In our modern society, God grants us everyday miracles, both pharmacologic and surgical, including immunity in the form of a vial of vaccine. I don't think these parents would deny insulin for their child newly diagnosed with diabetes, nor would they fail to strap their child into a car seat before starting the ignition. Vaccines are instruments of prevention, too, given to our healthy youngsters in order to keep them (and others) healthy.
"I'm concerned that so many people seem willing to let others carry the supposed burden of vaccination so that they don't have to," wrote Rachel Marie Stone in a Her.meneutics post a couple of years ago. "To me, that's a failure of the commandment to love our neighbors: our infant neighbors, our elderly neighbors, and our immune-compromised neighbors."
When I was vaccinated for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT) at the age of 4 months in 1954, my mother wrote in my baby book: Up most of the night with fever 104.5 degrees, a good "take" for the vaccine. She was relieved that it had made me sick, as it meant that my stimulated immune system would keep me safe if exposed to those killer diseases that were so common in the 1950s. Our society doesn't think about immunizations as we did back then and thankfully a febrile reaction like that would be unusual due to significant changes in how today's more effective vaccines are formulated.
I wish vaccines were perfect in their protection and potential side effects, but they aren't. I wish medications developed for treatment of some of these illnesses were perfectly effective, but we can't depend on a guarantee of cure once sickened. I wish our immune systems were perfect in their response to exposure to pathogens, but they too fail and people do die. Even though there will never be perfect prevention or treatment, parents in third world countries who have watched their children suffer and die from completely preventable disease will walk miles, for days, to get their children vaccinated when they learn of a mobile health clinic setting up an immunization center. Undeterred by that harsh reality, some in our highly educated society choose to run, not walk, in the opposite direction from much more easily accessible free state-supplied vaccine.
There will always be a new plague to worry about. Even as we eradicated illnesses through vaccine, we watched HIV, SARS, avian flu, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and MERS infect us. Some countries have seen the return of polio, and we remain concerned over smallpox somehow finding its way out of its lockbox in laboratories.
Given these threats and the new pathogens on the horizon, it remains unwise to refuse safe and effective vaccination. By doing so, we invite the old plagues, these killers of yesteryear, back into our homes, our churches and schools, and inevitably, onto our death certificates.
We can and must do better for our next generation.
Dr. Emily Polis Gibson is a wife, mother, farmer, and family physician living in northwest Washington state. She blogs at Barnstorming, and her writing has appeared on KevinMD.com and Salon.
