Pertussis Peril

[porphyry]

A few years ago, despite no science to back it, but lots of Hollywood B-list celebrities on the talk show circuit to tout this insanity, a vaccination denial movement caught on this country. Apparently, some doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who thankfully is no longer allowed to practice medicine, published an article in The Lancet that there might be a connection between infant vaccinations and autism. Wakefield didn't tell the journal that he'd been paid nearly a million dollars by some lawyers anxious to sue the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture the vaccines, but I guess Wakefield didn't think that was important, not after performing unethical invasive exams on poor autistic children, what's a little conflict of interest after bribing the guests at your son's birthday party with five pounds each to give a blood test? I guess he also didn't consider the health of all the infants whose idiotic parents would buy into this lunacy, or if he did consider it, he just didn't care. After all, he got a million dollars.

So, measles came back first. It had virtually been wiped out in this country. Kids died. Now pertussis, also known as whooping cough, is also back. Five babies have died in California--all unvaccinated against pertussis, of course--and the state has declared an epidemic in some parts.

I certainly hope that parents who think the likes of Jenny McCarthy ("Fuck science" is her mantra) and her ex-boyfriend, Jim Carrey, have anybody's best interest in their hearts except their own, are satisfied with their "well-informed" decision. As for McCarthy and Carrey and all those of the same group, I hope they look forward to their red-hot iron sarcophagi in the level of hell reserved for liars.

Yes, it's hard to watch your child get a shot. They cry. But five minutes later, they're asleep and the benefit from a moment's discomfort could save a baby's life. I just hope more children in California don't die, but I won't be surprised to see more fatalities.

As a final note, I wonder about the psychology of parents, laymen in medicine in science, who despite having no ability to understand science and medicine, instinctively react with their preconceived unfavorable attitude towards anyone they perceive as an authority. In my opinion, that's the real problem. How else could they so easily reject something proven and sound and tested--I mean, we haven't had massive outbreaks of so many diseases (polio, smallpox) due to these vaccines in decades--and adopt the "Fuck science" approach instead? I wish they'd find some other authority to go up against, one in which their children's lives aren't at stake.

Comments

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

Because unless they adopted or found their baby under a cabbage leaf, they just got to experience a bunch of doctors gleefully fucking poor Science?

It's pretty silly to think that anti-vaxing is anti-authoritian also, since wow do those people like authority.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

Man I am so disappointed in this rant, I keep thinking about it and thinking about how disappointing it is that you aren't really chewing on the meat of what is going on here.

The authority of parents is the last, the very last shred of the pre-Enlightment social order. It is not rational, it is not reducible. It stubbornly tends to reproduce traditional sex roles. It will always prevent the final triumph of the revolution. It's not an accident that the most media attention is on the issue where the authority of parents to refuse medical care for their children places the majority of parents in the wrong.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

In reference to your first post, it would seem that one of the main drivers of vaccine denial is 'the government wants to make me vaccinate => I won't vaccinate' That is what is meant by 'attitude towards ... authority' in the initial post.

In regard to your more substantive reply I recognize it as philosophically grounded in Traditionalism, which is a view I share (Mme. Malkhos shares many of the attitudes implied by traditionalism, but probably hasn't done sufficient research into the matter to properly articulate it). I would say, however, that it is not helpful to the traditionalist ideal to deny modern science (a mistake characteristic of fundamentalism). The 50% mortality rate before age 18 is not one the things I admire about traditional culture. I don't know enough about you to make general statements about you (though if you indeed are a traditionalist I should like to know you better), but your response here seems to be a reaction against modernity, as if 1) there were some hope of reversing its onslaught, and 2) you let modernity intrude into your private and inner lives. A more authentically Traditionalist response is to build up a life without reference to modernity. Accordingly new technological innovations have to be evaluated on their own merits, and vaccines are perhaps the best thing that Modernity has to offer.

I don't quite understand what you mean there at then ends, since it is only a tiny minority of parents who refuse medical care for their children.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

If I were a real traditionalist you can bet I wouldn't say "boner for Steiner" on the internet.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

it would seem that one of the main drivers of vaccine denial is 'the government wants to make me vaccinate => I won't vaccinate'

Why do you think this?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The mentality of a childish tantrum?

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to keep dancing around it, I think you're making up fantasies based on what you think is true about imaginary people that don't really exist. I don't know where you're getting the matter for your imagination to work on, but I guess this stuff is on TV these days. I know about anti-vaxers because I know them personally and have for my whole life, lots of them, and kneejerk antiauthoritarianism doesn't figure at all. Again, many of these people have boners for Steiner. Big ones.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

There you go again. They are not authoritarian, but they are followers of Steiner? How do you put those two together?

To clarify, my own relationship with Traditionalism is something that I would happy follow if, if I could find Traditionalists who are not insane (like Evola, Guenon, and Schuon were)

Could you clarify your own position that way?

Could you also clarify whether or not you believe Children ought to be given vaccines?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

While it is true that some doctors may abuse their authority position--Dr. Walter Freeman, infamous lobotomist, comes right to mind--I find it hard to believe that most physicians go into the field with the intent to harm or abuse their positions of authority. Sorry, I don't think it's silly for me to assume that must be true. I think science, medicine, and doctors have done the world a whole hell of a lot more good than its opposite.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

-I find it hard to believe that most physicians go into the field with the intent to harm or abuse their positions of authority.

I didn't say they did. But OBs are doing so, no matter what they intended to do. That's what I meant by what parents who refuse vaccination have just experienced.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Can you unpack the grammar of that?

Does it by any chance mean that parents who refuse vaccination have just experienced OBs (do you mean pediatricians?) abusing their positions of authority? If so, how would it be an abuse of authority to recommend scientifically sound medical treatment?

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

can't, must wash spit up out of hair
no more internet for me

[yechezkiel.livejournal.com]

mercyorbemoaned is cleaning puke out of her hair, so I've been asked to step in and be her translator.

OBs are causing harm, whether or not they intend to, because the current model of obstetrics does the harming. Parents have experienced this, and it breeds distrust in, let's say, the whole allopathic medical profession. You're thinking that these people are distinguishing between "scientifically sound" methods of treatment or not, when that isn't even on the radar. The problem isn't authority, here, it's that the authority has delegitimized itself in their eyes.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Allopathic medicine? Why didn't you say so? Goodbye!

[yechezkiel.livejournal.com]

Huh?

[yechezkiel.livejournal.com]

OK, so reading the rest of the thread, I think I've got a grasp on your strange freak-out.

I used the term "allopathic medicine" because that is what these people use, and (furthermore) the term is becoming increasingly common among practitioners of science-based medicine (if that's the term you prefer), anyhow. Merely using a word, especially when it has clear literary value in context, is not reason to shut someone out.

I've lived and worked my entire life around people in the medical profession: doctors, nurses, clinical nutritionists and pharmacists. Even a couple of researchers. I'm kept alive by the pharmalogical products of modern medicine. I love it. I was vaccinated. My kids will be vaccinated. (But, most obstetrics practice is still disturbed.) In practically every way, I am not prone to be empathetic to the anti-vaccine activists, and I do think the ones in media positions are causing active harm.

What mercyorbemoaned is trying to explain is that your model of why persons become anti-vaccine or whatever has little relation to the actual thought processes and worlds of the people who go through this stuff. There certainly are promoters who come at it through some misplaced desire to be iconoclastic or have minority knowledge or whatever (I would include, in here, many of the celebrity proponents), but for the average middle class lady it's because of trying to square some awful, alienating experiences with medicine to a world that places a whole lot of implicit trust and power in the hands of medical professionals (and the "God complex" is not wholly an unearned stereotype, as I'm sure you've realized if you've socialized long with many doctors). There are––and this is not controversial––areas of the standard model, especially regarding patient relations and making childbirth seem like a disease, where there are issues. For someone who thinks like, well, most people do, they don't articulate this as "oh, there's some problem with certain inherent features having gone monstrously wrong, here, likely due to the breakdown of culture and familial support", but rather as "there is something evil here, and that evil thing is the whole medical system". This is because they are emotively or intellectually incapable of the former, which is more an object of pity (the medical profession has failed them), than one of contempt.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

Look at it another way. There's a whole group of "natural parenting" issues - circumcision, unmedicated birth without being required to push in the lithotomy position (I am deliberately not discussing home vs hospital birth here), breastfeeding, and vaccination - on which the medical establishment is not necessarily on the right side. Vaccination in general happens to be one issue where it's easy to paint a picture of crazed Waldorf hippies with boners for Steiner who don't care if their kids die cause that means they weren't incarnating right vs pure clean Science. But vaccination isn't the whole story.

People are making the best decisions they can, partially influenced and deluded by status considerations, and they don't have the training or necessarily the native intelligence to assess the evidence for each issue. Part of the problem, it occurs to me writing this out, is that Jenny McCarthy has more status than your pediatrician. This is a general cultural issue, it's not the fault of individual parents.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Now we seem to be in more general agreement, especially in regard to the felicitous phrase 'crazed Waldorf hippies.'

TO be honest, Mme. Malkhos and I have had tremendous difficulties in understanding the thrust of your responses. Surely this last indicates that you agree vaccines are a good? Certainly you're correct that the warping of status is part of the problem. The thing that outrages me is that the people you mention who have more money than education are being preyed upon by mountebanks like Wakefield. But t the same they aren't making the best decisions they can, since considering how important the matter is, they have a responsibility to educate themselves. Just as annoying, if you actually go over to Age of Autism you will find not those people, but mothers of autistic children who, like the woman Wakefield disingenuously claimed in his recent Chicago speech led him to take up his crusade against vaccines (no mention of the money), with increasing are so driven by their own narcissism that they speak with increasing openness about the desire to murder their own autistic children (as Gigi Jordan recently did--her fortune ironically comes from the pay off following her divorce from a pharmaceutical executive). Its really that attitude,a s much as the leis, that leis behind my animus against vaccine denialism.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

The thrust of my responses is that you are both reacting to the simplified media portrayal of a complex and interesting issue. "Antivaccintionism" existed before Andrew Wakefield and would have become an issue without him. Patty O'Mara is more important than he is - she lit on him and gave him exposure to her base. But she's less mediagenic, so you know about him and not her.

I also think you both are pretty mean to individual parents, mothers especially, based on stuff you're reading online and in magazines. These people are much more sinned against than sinning.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I get my information for a group of blogs kept by physicians who are at the forefront of combating Vaccine denialism (centered around Science Based Medicine) and from occasional forays into anti-vaccination blogs. My original interest in the phenomenon was as a parallel to religious fundamentalism. How can be people continue to deny something that is so obviously true, not matter, and how thoroughly the truth is pointed out to them?

Other than the power puff girls and the Tour de France, it must be going on five years since I have watched a television program. I did watch the recent Nova on this subject on-line, but it played little role in forming my opinions.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the reason it matters that you're being mean is that it is really important that people educate themselves to the extent they are capable and trust authority past that point. Calling people narcissists, making vague nasty comments about their psychological state, and generally circling around and occasionally lightly touching the central insult: "you're placing your own needs above your child, you BAD MOM!" is not the way to do it.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The women I called narcissists are those who profess a wish to end being bothered by the duties of raising their children by killing them. It seems rather kind.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

If the individual parent can't ultimately be held responsible for whom they choose to believe or not believe, then who can be held accountable?

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I'm too busy worrying about my ultimate responsibility to worry about other people's.

[gislebertus.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wish all anti-vac parents would catch smallpox.

Then I realize they're probably of the age that their parents had the vaccine administered to them.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I think there is some Hollywood film based on Wells In the Days of the Comet that shows a comet impacting the earth and then ricocheting off with a bit of New Zealand intact on it or something--a very vague memory. But I just found out what actually happens in the novel. The earth passes through the tail of a comet that contains a gas that makes everyone think and act reasonably! That is what we need.

[eurynome1967.livejournal.com]

Loath though I am to stick my oar into this vibrant discussion, I just wanted to say a couple of rather mundane things.
- I think that there is definitely an element of rebellion against a perceived 'system' in some people's refusal to give their children any vaccinations. I can understand why people would feel like this, even though I think they are mistaken. But then people who flail against 'the system' often do flail in completely the wrong direction.
- In Britain, the crisis arose not because of a suspected connection between the pertussis vaccination and autism, but because of the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella. Several children had very bad reactions to this, and some distressed parents linked the 'onset' of autism with it. Since autism tends to start to manifest itself at about the age children were having this injection, you can see why in their distress people would make the connection. I can see why giving a small child three vaccinations at once might be a bit much for its little body to cope with, and the thinking parents' solution was to ask for the vaccines to be given in three separate doses, though in some case parents were forced to pay for this. I can also see why the government felt that the statistical likelihood of a few bad reactions was acceptable set against the overall national health improvement. (That, mind you, is a bit of a contradiction of the fact that they have stopped giving children vaccinations against TB, particularly in the lead-up to our hosting the Olympics ...) I am not a parent, but if I were, I think I would have gone for separate vaccinations once I thought about it. I do think, given how vaccines work, that three at once is too much for a very small child.
- I do completely accept the importance of mass-vaccination. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time each year explaining to 11-year-old girls why they want to be vaccinated against tetanus, diphtheria, and polio, and why an injection in the arm in a sterile environment is better than being paralysed or choking to death on your own membranes, etc. I also think of a pair of sisters whose parents refused to vaccinate them against anything (middle class intellectual rebels who refused to allow the government to dictate their children's health) and the amount of school those girls missed, and our constant worry that they would infect those of us who are too old to have had all the vaccinations ...

I hope this doesn't change the tone of the discussion too much - my intention is to be mild-mannered about this.

[med_cat]

Agreed on all counts...people forgot, I think, just how dangerous these 'childhood illnesses' can be...

Pertussis is bad enough...I do hope we won't see diphtheria next.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

A while ago, I read about a woman who was mysteriously taken ill. It proved to be by pestilence and this was somewhere in The Wild West of the U.S. I recall. It seemed hard to find a vaccin but someone cured her and she lived to tell. At least one should catch something medievally original like that; imagine dying of smallpox as a grown-up in the 21st (utterly boring) century!

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

And here I thought your "Stop Vaccinations" bumper sticker was an anachronistic joke.

After all, Alfred Russel Wallace was opposed to vaccinations. And in favor of Spiritualism. He's always been my favorite individual to develop the concept of natural selection, though of course Darwin comes in as a not-too-distant second.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Those are the sorts of reasons he's mostly forgotten.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Good point. There are so many other fields in which absolute truth is asserted with very little evidence (religion, nationalism, advcertising etc.) Wouldn't these be better subjects for cynical rejection?

update

[benicek.livejournal.com]

I took Jana to the doctor today and got her vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, tetanus, pertussis and poliomyelitis. She didn't even cry :)

Re: update

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I congratulate you. And her, for not crying. When Andrew started kindergarten and had to get four booster shots, he didn't cry either, which surprised me, because anything can set him to mooing unpleasantly.