Yes Virginia, Refusing to Vaccinate Does Lead to Outbreaks
A look at what actual science has to say about some common anti-vaccine arguments.
I get it. The decision to vaccinate yourself or your child is a contentious subject. Stacey Morrison’s post last week (or more specifically the comments it generated) proved that point. This conversation is important and the facts are important — even if it isn’t (in some circles) popular.
A paper was published in February in PLOS ONE (not behind a pay wall so I encourage you to read it if you’re interested) titled “Positive Network Assortativity of Influenza Vaccination at a High School: Implications for Outbreak Risk and Herd Immunity”. It’s a bit of a mouthful, I’ll admit. The authors also tend to speak about the outcomes in statistical terms so it’s not likely to show up on a NY Times bestseller list any time soon. For everyone’s convenience I am going to summarize the main points that they made in plain english.
Work done by previous research teams has already shown something incredibly interesting (in my opinion). Though some of you might think it is an obvious conclusion — sometimes the most common sense things don’t actually pan out when you analyze the data. In this instance, however, the common sense and reality are the same.
In the new study the authors showed that when they looked at the distribution of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in a high school the groups tended to cluster. Now in this case, they were looking at the seasonal flu shot, and not the standard childhood vaccinations, but the principles can be extended to other vaccination programs.
What the authors found was that students tended to positively associate (as in, were more likely to associate) with students of a similar vaccination status — more so than if they were to randomly associate. When the researchers ran outbreak simulations from the groups that they identified from the surveys collected, they found that the clusters led to larger potential outbreaks than a random clustering pattern would have — 22% larger outbreaks in fact.
What this means is that clusters of unvaccinated individuals, who due to social stratification based on similar opinions, reduced the herd immunity of the community at large and lead to more frequent and/or larger outbreaks of said disease.
Now before you write this off as “oh, it’s just the seasonal flu” — the exact same issue has cropped up time and again with more serious diseases. The Whooping Cough is a well known example, but it’s pretty controversial so let’s talk about something that I think everyone can agree on.
Measles
Measles is insanely contagious. It spreads through microdroplets in the air (airborne transmission) and a person is contagious up to five days prior to the onset of the rash symptoms. On average it takes about 2 weeks from the time a person is exposed until they begin to develop symptoms — which means that this disease can spread extremely quickly and silently at first — if there are enough people around who are at risk for contracting it.
There have been outbreaks here in the US (despite being declared “eradicated” in 2000), as well as England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and many other locations with high vaccination rates. Measles, by the way, requires a 90%+ vaccine coverage to be contained due to its highly infectious nature. These outbreaks really puzzled the hell out of physicians and researchers, until they took a closer look at the distribution of vaccinations. In the Netherlands, for example, it was noted that the outbreaks occurred mainly in populations the consisted of religious groups that do not vaccinate. In other countries it was shown that disease outbreaks also clustered with subregions that were anti-vaccination for one reason or another, despite the overall high coverage nation-wide. Further studies have shown that the heterogeneity in vaccinations due to opinions on vaccination makes a 90% national coverage function more like a coverage of less than 70% — and in the case of diseases like measles this just doesn’t cut it. (doi: 10.1098/rsif.2008.0271)
image credit: Julien Harneis
The researchers proved that vaccination coverage in countries like the US, where the population has near universal access to vaccines, is heterogeneous due to negative opinions on vaccination. They also proved that this heterogeneity in coverage is linked to the outbreaks we have been seeing lately in these diseases.
In the end what this means is that people who are unvaccinated are putting themselves at even greater risk of contracting a vaccine-preventable disease than was originally suspected. So many people (myself included) have made the argument that it is socially irresponsible not to vaccinate due to loss of herd immunity — but it appears that even more than that, you’re putting you and yours at much greater risk by choosing not to vaccinate than you might have thought.
The chances are that if you choose not to vaccinate, you probably hang out with other people who also choose not to vaccinate. The key to stopping an epidemic before it starts is to interrupt the spread (through vaccinated or immune individuals), which protects the unvaccinated individuals as well. But in these substantial (and growing) social communities of people who are voluntarily abstaining from immunization, those roadblocks to transmission are lost — and the likelihood of disease specifically affecting your community is much higher. I’m not making the social responsibility argument anymore — I’m asking you for the sake of you and your family to consider the enormous risks you’re taking. Risks much greater than those of having a bad reaction to a vaccine (<1/100,000 for a severe reaction like anaphylaxis) — in fact the risk for having an adverse reaction to an antibiotic is much greater!
A common refrain from people who are anti-vaccination is that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children, and they are quick to point to google results that back them up. To those individuals I want to make something extremely clear — practically every single page that refers to a “published study” is referring to a survey conducted on the internet that was publicized through social media. While the numbers involved are large (13000+), the survey was disseminated through social networking and word of mouth. Just like the studies I discussed earlier that showed a clustering of people based on opinions on vaccination, this study is also subject to the same sort of bias in assortment. Meaning that the people who filled out the survey were more likely to have either a) a positive opinion on not vaccinating or b) a negative experience after vaccination. People who have had a neutral (or positive) experience with vaccinations are far less likely to have taken the survey — or even be aware of its existence for that matter. What this means is that this survey is about as valid and close to reality as would be a survey on the best books in existence given to the members of Mugglenet.com (spoiler alert: I bet they say Harry Potter).
The results page for this survey is also extremely misleading in that it references an actual scientific study conducted in Germany that compared the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children — claiming to have similar results. It does not. In the German study, over 13,000 children from non-immigrant families were randomly selected from 167 locations scattered across all parts of the country. Parents were asked if their children had ever been diagnosed with measles, mumps, rubella, and pertussis — along with atopic diseases like cold/flu-like infection, tonsillitis, herpesvirus infection, bronchitis (not when asthma was present), gastrointestinal infection, allergic rhinoconjunctivitis, atopic eczema, bronchial asthma, etc. The illness related events were then compared to the vaccination records for every child, and subdivided based on vaccination status.
The results were exactly what you would expect — unvaccinated children had a 10-17% lifetime risk of developing one of the big vaccine-preventable diseases (depending on the disease) while vaccinated children had only a 2-7% chance (again depending on the disease) (Fig 1). Even more interesting though was the data showing that for all other common illnesses (including allergies, colds, infections, asthma, etc) the two groups were not statistically significantly different (Fig 2-3). This is science lingo that means that any differences between the groups cannot be explained by the grouping itself, and are due to random chance. Essentially what they are saying is that there is no evidence of association between general heath of children and their vaccination status (excluding the vaccine-preventable diseases, for which there was a clear association).
Let me repeat: there is no scientific evidence to support the assertion that unvaccinated children are healthier than their vaccinated brethren.
If you are one of the fortunate families that has been extremely healthy in general and never had a brush with a serious disease — you’re lucky. Literally. That is all that it is. Notice that even the vaccinated kids in the German study only experienced any illness 30% of the time at maximum. However, should something like measles come calling, you need to understand that 90% of the people who are exposed (and susceptible) to it get sick, and 10% of those infected will die.
Another sentiment I have heard expressed quite often is the mantra “I’ve heard of plenty of people who regret vaccinating, but I’ve never heard of anyone who regrets not vaccinating” and to those people I want to leave these final thoughts — better expressed by the parents (or people) who experienced them than myself
While at the end of the day whether to vaccinate or not is still your choice, I’m pleading with those of you who don’t vaccinate to re-think your decision. If not for the immuno-compromised (like my father who has ALS and is at constant risk for contracting, and dying from, airborne diseases), the pregnant, the very old, or our smallest youngest babies who can’t get thier shots yet — then do it for yourself, your kids, and your friends. Because the numbers show that its going to be you who are the worst affected when, not if, disease strikes.
