The Cost of Ignorance: The Cons of Dropping Vaccination Rates

Ian Barry
Staff Columnist

I like to think of myself as a patient individual. But, like anyone, there are things for which I have an especially low tolerance. Among these things is the anti-vaccination movement and its associated ideologies. It is, frankly, repugnant to me. It is also an excellent example of just how much damage ignorance can do.

Anti-vaccination sentiment has a long history. Vaccination has had staunch opponents since its inception in 1721, who often, as today, based their objections in religious rhetoric. But the contemporary movement is in large part based upon the idea of a link between childhood vaccinations and the development of autism.

I’m going to say this up front: it is not true. This idea has no basis in reality. It started with one study published in one journal in 1998. The author, Andrew Wakefield, claimed that 12 children began displaying autistic behaviors after administration of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. He continued publishing papers over the next few years attacking the safety of vaccination programs and insinuating the autism link.

Wakefield was later shown to have fabricated his results. He received large amounts of money from lawyers who were preparing a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. They paid Wakefield to fabricate evidence in favor of their lawsuit. It should go without saying that money cannot change the way the reality works, and there is a reason that scientists are ethically obligated to divulge any potential conflicts of interest along with their published research.

The damage, however, was done. In the wake of Wakefield’s ‘research’, MMR vaccination rates in the United Kingdom dropped precipitously. Significant numbers of parents opted out of administering the vaccine, disrupting the herd immunity. Herd immunity is a mathematical concept by which in a sufficiently vaccinated population (the threshold is around 85 percent for many diseases) will protect individuals who are too young to be vaccinated, or would have an adverse reaction to the vaccine. If an unvaccinated individual is surrounded only by those who have had the vaccine, there is no valid path the disease can take which will bring it into contact with the unprotected person. As rates of vaccination drop, paths of transmission open up. By the same token, when vaccination levels drop low enough, epidemics become a possibility. This is precisely what happened in the U.K. In the decade or so since Wakefield’s paper, the corresponding drop in vaccination rates has caused numerous deaths and outbreaks of diseases that were previously well-controlled. Innocent people, who depend on the people around them to protect them from these diseases, are dying.

Though these examples come from the U.K, an analogous process has occurred in the U.S. Anti-vaccine movements purport a link between autism and thiomersal, despite the lack of any scientific evidence in favor of the link, and a significant amount of evidence against. The purported increase in autism diagnoses is most likely due to increased awareness of the condition. Those who claim thiomersal causes autism are apparently unaware of the fact that the symptoms of mercury poisoning and the symptoms of autism have very little overlap. And despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence to support these ideas, they persist. Our vaccination rates have dropped, previously rare diseases have come back into evidence, and people are dying of them. Our ignorance is literally killing us.