A Vaccine Hesitant Decoder Ring

Confused By Anti-Vax Arguments?

Here’s A Quick Summary.

According to Jonathan Berman, author of Anti-Vaxxers: How To Challenge A Misinformed Movement, committed anti-vaxxers make up roughly 2% of the population, while another 20% are vaccine-hesitant.

It is likely ill-advised and unproductive to get into drawn-out debates with committed anti-vaxxers, but talking to those who are vaccine hesitant might be crucial as we seek to recover from the Covid pandemic —especially given that they are being systematically targeted by the former group.

You may be hesitant yourself, or perhaps have friends and family who are. It can be very tricky to sort through the deluge of contradictory messaging about vaccines in general, not to mention the wilder conspiracy theories about animal DNA, microchip surveillance, and 5G controlling your actions!

Do vaccines cause autism? Are they antithetical to a healthy lifestyle and “natural immunity?” Are there debilitating side effects that Big Pharma is covering up? What’s up with those scary-sounding ingredients? Surely it’s a personal choice —if you believe you are protected by a vaccine, what do you care if I or my child gets it

This list is intended as the first in a series designed to provide context, grounding, and information, while acknowledging how emotionally charged and scary the topic can seem.

Let’s start with some history and some numbers to help establish context.

1) Vaccines are the single most significant breakthrough in the history of medical science and have saved millions of lives.

Smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, Diptheria, and other devastating diseases took the lives of kids or left them disabled or disfigured routinely before this breakthrough. We live in a privileged society that has not in recent memory known that level of devastation, and so take not only the massive positive impact of vaccines for granted, but also underestimate the horrific pre-vaccine legacy of these diseases.

Today’s global crisis shows what reality looks like without a vaccine for a serious and highly contagious disease. It’s that simple. This has happened before. The argument that tries to minimize the extraordinary success of vaccines by saying those diseases were going away anyway due to better plumbing, hand-washing, etc is just factually wrong.

2) All vaccines are different, but they are very well researched and regulated. The likelihood of a severe adverse reaction to the recommended childhood vaccines is roughly one to two in a million.

By comparison, your odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are (depending on the source) somewhere between 1 an 15,000 and 1 in 3,000. Odds of death by drowning are 1 in around 1200, and dying in a car accident are 1 in 100. I am willing to bet the chances are still good you’re going to drive, swim, and maybe even get caught in the rain once or twice with your kids. Notice too that you’ll probably drive more than you’ll swim, and swim more than you’ll spend time outside in the rain —an inversion of their potential danger.

But because literally billions of doses of vaccines are delivered each year, even 1 in a million is a significant number of people. Most people with serious adverse reactions make a full recovery —but there are very rare instances of disability or death, which is of course, awful.

It is telling to weigh that against how, for example, without the polio vaccine, death or paralysis from that disease averages around 5,000 per million. Before the vaccine, we lost about 400 or 500 kids to measles in the USA a year. For many hundreds of years, smallpox would ravage countries, leaving as much as 25% of the population killed, and many survivors with horrible scars on their skin or blindness. In the last serious rubella epidemic in the US (1964) 11,000 pregnant women lost their babies, 2100 newborns died, and 20,000 were born with various serious disabilities from the infection. The WHO estimates that globally, vaccines save 2 to 3 million lives a year.

While all diseases and their vaccines are different, gaining herd immunity usually requires that between 50% and 90% of the population be vaccinated. Attaining these levels is necessary to protect those who cannot be vaccinated due to age (infant or elderly), fragile health, autoimmune diseases, or severe allergies.

3) Anti-vaxxers are usually sincere, but they have the math confused and have also bought into conspiracy theories based on lies, misinformation, bad reasoning/logic, and confusion about the science and the facts.

• There is zero evidence for any link between vaccines and autism. This rumor was started by a falsified research paper that was actually admittedly done for financial gain by a disgraced Dr. Andrew Wakefield who had his medical license revoked. All subsequent studies (there have been many) have failed to show any link whatsoever. But you know how persistent rumors can be, and this failure hasn’t stopped Wakefield from going on to a lucrative career as an anti-vax media figure.

• Pharmaceutical companies make about 2 to 3% of their revenue from vaccines. They are expensive to research and manufacture and are sold very cheaply. The idea that they are this big diabolical money-making scam that incentivizes all sorts of cover-ups, short cuts, and straight-up lying with no concern for the lives of babies is far-fetched.

• There is really no such entity as “Big Pharma.” While the term can be used as shorthand in some contexts, beware of the classic conspiracy-style trope in which an over-generalized and demonized scapegoat is painted. It can be like the “mainstream media,” or “the elites” —just a lazy generalization.

Are there serious issues with the incestuous relationships between capitalism, drug research and pricing, and government lobbyists? Yes. Reform and regulation of all of that are crucial. I believe the pharmaceutical industry should be much more government-funded and regulated, and there should be zero marketing to the public. Zero.

But the conspiracy-style argument will go from a legitimate complaint about a specific case or trend in corruption to then generalizing it as if it applies to something else. As if doctors thinking smoking was healthy in the ’40s translates directly to asserting that doctors today can’t be trusted.

You know, like the JFK assassination looked super fishy, so I don’t believe the “official narrative” about 911. Likewise, here is exhibit A about a corrupted study or a case in which a pharmaceutical company had to pay damages for drug side effects, therefore you can’t trust anything they say and vaccines must cause autism, autoimmune disorders, SIDS, and being transgender (not making that up!)

The logic is completely flawed.

Tens of thousands of highly educated, smart, sincere, and hard working scientific researchers dedicate their lives to developing vaccines and other treatments for the collective good of humanity. Just as with medical professionals working on the front lines right now and risking their lives and sanity during this pandemic, being confronted by covid-denialism (sometimes even by dying patients) is a slap in the face, so too the throwaway lazy labelling of the entirety of so-called “Big Pharma” as all being corrupt, dishonest and willing to sell out the safety and even the lives of the world’s babies for profit is beyond insulting and worse, simply categorically untrue.

4) Anti-vaxxers will dispute the numbers of vaccine-related adverse reactions, but that is because they either misunderstand or deliberately distort the science.

Finding a thousand parents on an internet forum who all believe their child was vaccine-injured is not the same as actually proving scientifically that there was a causal link. Think about it: If 100 million kids get a vaccine, how many of those might within a year of that also have an illness, neurological issue, the onset of autism, development of an autoimmune disorder, etc

They probably did a lot of other things in that time period as well: Watched TV, ate sugar, looked directly at the sun, tried (and hopefully didn’t succeed at) getting their tongues stuck to lamp-posts in the snow, played computer games, and so on. But because there is a climate of suspicion in some circles about vaccines, they get randomly singled out as a potential cause, despite there being no evidence of any link, and despite scientifically identified side-effects or allergic reactions bearing no semblance to these conditions.

It’s the correlation vs causation distinction, and saying it is inaccurate to blame the vaccine because careful studies find no causal links whatsoever to these conditions is not a cover-up or censorship, nor is it gas-lighting those parents who obviously are in a lot of pain and looking for answers. It’s just letting them know that there is no evidence the vaccine caused the problem.

What the data shows is that with the exception of a small group of people either not healthy enough or with specific conditions/sensitivities, we put ourselves, our families, and communities at much greater risk by not vaccinating than by vaccinating.

5) Anti-vaxxers will hit you with a boat-load of copy-paste links to the online archive called PubMed. These can seem like slam dunks. But it’s usually based on another fallacy called cherry-picking the data.

Here’s the thing: PubMed gathers all studies published in all journals into a huge database, that as a non-researcher is very hard to understand.

Seeing: Who did the study, if it has been peer-reviewed, how long ago it was done, and other details of the methodology can be complicated —most people just read the title and/or the short abstract or description at the top.

You can find single studies on PubMed that seem to support whatever claim you like. That’s how cherry-picking works —but it is not how scientific consensus is arrived at; and the scientific consensus on vaccines is that they are safe. Of course, some vaccines have had problems, some have been recalled —but we know this because the system in place for that aspect of the science works, specifically as a way of dealing with the imperfect contours of our knowledge.

What is more revealing/useful is if you look for systematic reviews on PubMed that summarize the current state of the field you’re looking into.

Because science is always a work in progress, it is best to get up to date information that looks at multiple studies in appropriate time sequence and takes into account the process whereby science-informed knowledge is revised and established.