Politics and Science of Vaccines
I get it. In our system of government, few things can get done outside of a political process. For example, there is a heated debate in California right now over Senate Bill 277, a bill to do away with personal and religious exemptions for vaccination in order to attend public schools. The bill has anti-vaccine groups in a froth. They have gone so far as to claim that it’s the first step towards an authoritarian government or something.
I won’t bore you with how they’re physically threatening the authors and supporters of the bill.
If this were a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to have these politically-charged debates on these issues. The overwhelming majority of vaccines work, and they work well. Yes, we have the flu and the BCG vaccines, which could be better, but all the other vaccines have tremendously brought down the number and proportion of death and disability from some really horrible diseases.
We also have a system for vaccines to be approved to be used in humans and to be put on the market. We then have a system for tracking their performance. And we have a system to compensate people who, on very rare instances, have bad reactions to the vaccine. (And I do mean rare.)
It’s hard to do, but we have to use a utilitarian mindset when it comes to vaccines. They cause reactions (on rare occasion bad reactions), but they save hundreds if not thousands of lives. They reduce the cost of healthcare. They increase attendance at school. They decrease absenteeism from parents having to stay home and take care of sick children. And so on and so forth.
But, because of the way that our government is set up, we need to have a debate about whether or not to use them. In one way, this is a good thing. You don’t want the government to suddenly decide that you need to do something without a debate on its merits. On the other hand, you can’t have a very vocal and very threatening few derail such an important public health intervention.
I don’t want to be in the shoes of the politicians who have to debate this. At the same time, I don’t like being in my shoes. I don’t like having to explain to every single anti-vaccine person with a social media account that the risk of vaccines is not measured by their standard. They many times claim that the true risk of measles is measured by dividing all known cases of measles by the total population of the United States. It doesn’t work that way. Risk is measured by the number of cases divided by number of people at risk, the non-immune. Also, risk changes depending on the setting. Students in a school with 80% unvaccinated are much more at risk of measles than students in a school with 99% vaccinated. It is precisely that risk that bills like the one in California are trying to bring down.
Then the same people come up with the Nirvana Fallacy, where — in their minds — vaccines are not worth it because they’re not 100% safe and effective. Yet they use seat belts in their cars, wear life preservers in the pool, or eat hamburgers for lunch. Nothing in the world is perfect, and nothing will be, but they demand 100% perfection from vaccines or no vaccines at all. What kind of a twisted logic is that?
It’s the kind of logic that makes me wish that our system of government listened to the overwhelming scientific evidence in medical and scientific matters and didn’t hold debates where the people with unrealistic concerns can scare so many people. I’m not talking about a full-blown dictatorship or anything like that. It should be a government whose decisions are science-based at best and evidence-based at worst, period.
But, again, that is not the government we live in, and it’s the government we have to work with. So my hat goes off to all those political activists who are working on getting the bill in California, and similar bills in other states, to go through the political process. It’s tough work, and work that would have driven me mad because of all the ignorance out there. You guys are heroes in my book.
