Vaccination is the New Flouridation

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 6:56 AM on May 14, 2008.

The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.

I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.

Anti-vaccination cranks make me see red, in no small part because there’s no excuse for the levels of ignorance they demonstrate about the real value of vaccines. It would be more understandable if the invention of the polio vaccination, for instance, was so far in the past that there were no survivors of the disease hanging around being reminders of how terrible it really is. But there are plenty of people who had the disease that are around, suffering the lifelong effects of even the minor cases that would have allowed you to reach middle age after suffering that disease in your youth. I for one am incredibly grateful to have never known anyone with small pox, tetanus or even the fucking mumps my whole life.

Like all good cranks, anti-vaccination assholes move the goal posts constantly. The big hobbyhorse of anti-vaccination cranks is autism rates (even though the connection between autism and vaccinations has been thoroughly debunked), but of course, the invention of the HPV vaccine hasn’t passed notice, though you get that when you’re like 12 years old, so even if you believe childhood vaccinations have something to do with autism (which you shouldn’t), then you should realize that 12 is way too late to “develop” autism. But it’s this lightening rod because it’s new and it’s sex-related and thus the cranks can hang their hat on it, and get all excited about building a coalition between the usual anti-vaccination cranks and the sexphobes, getting more power.

And of course, the invocations of “Big Pharma” do not an argument make. It’s childish to think that something is an unvarnished, irredeemable evil just because someone made money doing it. Big Pharma does a lot of wrong things, but mainly because they charge too much for products that are actually good. If they were charging too much for products that were just crap, then they’d be no more a political problem than people who make designer handbags. The abstinence-only assholes resort to screaming “Big Pharma” to discourage women from taking the birth control pill, which shows what kind of crankery you’re getting into with that tactic.

Like all good cranks, evidence that conflicts with their theories is simply ignored. The idea behind the autism-vaccination link was that the mercury used in some vaccinations caused autism. Well, they don’t use mercury in childhood vaccinations anymore and haven’t for awhile, but autism rates remain high. Maybe the vaccinations are causing autism out of tradition, then? There’s a theory that kosher laws against the eating of pork were initially developed for health reasons, but were kept out of tradition after the health reasons disappeared. Is that how vaccines do it?

Promoting the idea that there’s these non-existence connections between vaccinations and autism and other ill health effects is vicious and cruel to parents whose children are suffering from the diseases that are claimed to be caused by vaccinations. I can’t imagine how much a parent with an autistic child would suffer from guilt if she actually believed this bullcrap, because after all, it was she who got the child vaccinated. All needless—they may not know what causes autism, but I’m going to bet that if they ever do find out, it’s probably going to be genetic and not something that parents could have known or prevented.

Maybe what bothers me the most is that the opposition to vaccinations tends to play into this knee-jerk Luddite mentality. Not that I don’t think new technologies shouldn’t be carefully examined to see if they do more good than harm, and that things that prove to be problems like cars should be seriously reconsidered. But a lot of people don’t want to do the hard work of taking each new technology and its issues and problems on for itself, and instead just want this general “new is bad/old ways were better” rule that they can apply indiscriminately. The traditionalism fallacy infects people on the right and the left both, though often in different ways. For instance, when conservatives decry the “unnatural”, they’re referring to sodomy or women getting paychecks, and when liberals do it, they’re probably talking about medications. Of course, some conservatives are beginning to see the benefits of embracing the knee-jerk hostility to modern medicine, at least when it applies to women, because of the contraception thing.* Anti-vaccination crankery doesn’t make much sense outside of this knee-jerk hostility to innovation and science.

The irony here is that scientists really aren’t trying to conquer the imperfect body at all. Vaccination technology actually makes more sense if you realize it came from a place of great respect for the the complexity of life, and the careful study of defenses that had evolved in the body. Which is why I love vaccinations. They work with the pre-existing environment. The real wow factor is that the body responds so well and so predictably to the vaccination. In one sense, it’s a bit alarming that I extended my arm the other day to be shot up with a syringe-full of dead bacteria that would, if alive, kill me pretty damn dead, but it was no big deal at all, because I trusted my body’s immune system to kick into action and do its job. So who’s the one that’s really trusting nature to do what it does best?

*None of this is to say that I’m opposed to the midwifery movement or anything. When they argue for it on pragmatic terms—it’s less expensive and less invasive, for instance—I’m all ears. Because that’s the point of this whole rant. If you got the evidence, you got an argument. But when people start waxing about how it’s more natural and that’s how they did it in the old days, I think “menstrual huts” and wonder why people seem to think that undernourished, illiterate people who didn’t get out much from the past were somehow magically smarter than we are now.

Tagged as: vaccines, autism