The antivaxers are back in the news, as they always will be until finally shamed into oblivion.
Yesterday a Rockland County (NY) judge overturned an exclusion order that prohibited unvaccinated minors from public spaces like malls and schools. The judge’s reasoning seemed to combine a belief that the current number sick is too small to be an “emergency” and that the order exceeds legal limits on the powers of the County Executive. I have no idea about the merits of the legal question. I have a good idea what will happen when Rockland’s undervaccinated Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community celebrates Passover with measles-incubating children in attendance.
Given Team Plague’s extraordinary success at bringing measles back to the United States this year, I thought it worthwhile to explain where today’s antivax movement comes from. It’s a marriage.
The older groom are diehards who never accepted the Germ Theory of Disease, all the way back to Pasteur, adhering to the rival, and discredited, Filth Theory, in which their own good health is not related to community immunity and reduced contagion, but their own excellent nutrition and hygiene. The best window into these people, other than their own web sites which I won’t link, is Eula Biss’s recent book On Immunity. Even I hadn’t thought, until reading the book, how the Filth Theorists hijack language, describing their often-inert pills as “supplements” (complimenting and complementing your own well-functioning system) that will “cleanse” you of “toxins”. The entire metaphor pre-supposes the Filth Theory. Other than some value to Vitamin A in the unlikely case you are malnourished, their products’ effect on measles is nil. Every antivax website is full of charts showing how “sanitation” drove down mortality from infectious diseases. (The less capable antivaxers go so far as to claim that their charts, clearly labeled Death Rate, also imply that incidence was reduced without vaccines, a claim that is simply false.)
The blushing young bride are certain parents of autistic children. I don’t want to minimize their struggle. In the Hallmark version, their neurodivergent child will turn out to be a brilliant, highly compensated computer genius, or perhaps a musical prodigy. In real life, some of these families are struggling with a child who is totally non-verbal, often aggressive, requires diapers, and will never live any sort of independent life—needing full-time paid care after the parents have died. Our health system does little for these families. My second-grade BFF had an older brother who matched this description (of course, no one said “autistic” back then) who was eventually placed in an institution. Even these institutions have mostly closed.
However, my sympathy for these families wanes once they decide that the only way Junior, breast-fed (antivaxers tend to obsess about this) and raised on organic baby food, couldn’t come out perfect is some exogenous factor, like a vaccination. The bond that holds the bride and groom together is the shared narcissistic belief that upper-middle-class immune systems can eat measles and polio for breakfast, but somehow can be laid low by shots. The antivaxers had three separate hearings before the Vaccine Court’s special masters for their claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism; they lost all three. In one of them (Cedillo), the family had to endure experts’ reviewing home movies that showed their daughter’s autistic behavior—months before her MMR shots.
The betrothal was arranged by Andy Wakefraud Wakefield, a former UK physician, since stricken off (like disbarred), who took hundreds of thousands of GB Pounds from a law firm looking to make a killing on lawsuits against vaccines. Wakefield himself held the patent on a rival vaccine whose adoption over the existing MMR would have made him even richer. Wakefield now makes an excellent living on this side of the Atlantic, speaking to autism groups and soliciting funds for lawsuits he says will vindicate him, but which he abandons. (He also abandoned his wife for supermodel Elle Macpherson.)
The antivax movement threatens to be a victim of its own success, as the predictable outbreaks have suddenly left much of the country impatient with their look-at-clean-me free-riding on the great majority who have put up with the bother and tiny risks of vaccines. We can support more laws like California’s SB-277, which put an end to non-medical exemptions to vaccines. We may need a follow-up as a small number of unethical doctors are selling fake medical exemptions, but not if we take their licenses away.
I had measles. Guys, you don’t need it.