The rates of non-immunization in the different schools on Kauai were recently reported in Civil Beat. The non-immunization rates for a few of these schools are high enough to be of real concern. This report came out a few days ago and has generated aggressive debate. I, like most pediatricians these days, have been involved in this discussion for most of my professional life. This article is an attempt to address many of the issues that seem to be at the heart of the debate.
Opponents of vaccinations often point to the distortion of science for profit. They are correct; science these days is often distorted by a profit motive: the tobacco industry, the sugar industry, the chemical and plastic industries, big oil and big pharma, have all played a significant role in rolling out theories and “proofs” that are not true.
The opioid epidemic, for example, seems to have exploded into the serious problem it is today by false information spread by the manufacturer of the drug, oxycontin.
A very important difference between the recommendations about vaccines and the information provided by the companies above is that the recommendations and safety monitoring of vaccines is watched over by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The AAP is not for profit nor for sale. We, the pediatricians and pediatric specialists of America, are its membership. The AAP has scientific committees examining and following almost everything that affects childhood health and their advice is heeded around the world. For example, my concerns about chronic pesticide exposure began with the AAP’s reporting on the potential dangers.
The AAP has not backed away from any battle for a healthier environment. Their most recent review concerned the lack of regulation in food additives and they were vehement in their criticism of the poor regulatory systems and the dangers of many of the chemicals allowed in our food.
One needs to carefully pick the experts they believe. The carefully researched AAP recommendations carry much more scientific value then the distorted and often misleading evidence which can be presented by anybody on the internet.
There was a sad story in the news recently about a 7-week-old baby in the mainland who died from a type of meningitis that is not yet vaccine preventable.
I was struck by how tragic the story was and also struck that a mainland case of meningitis is now national news. In comparison, in my first 11 months as a practicing pediatrician (43 years ago) in a small rural hospital, we diagnosed and treated 11 cases of bacterial meningitis.
Because meningitis was so common, I doubt if any of the cases made even the local news. Bacterial meningitis is an infection of the brain. In those days, we considered the diagnosis of meningitis with almost every child we saw with a fever who looked sick.
We worried because a delay in treatment almost invariably led to severe brain damage or death. There are now vaccines against three different types of meningitis. I have not seen a case of bacterial meningitis in 30 years.
Not only is bacterial meningitis dramatically less in vaccinated children it is now also less common in non-vaccinated children. This is because of what we call “herd immunity” or “community immunity.”
Without vaccines, diseases can travel quickly through a community, making many people sick. But if enough people are vaccinated against a disease, it can’t travel as easily from person to person — and the entire community is less likely to get the disease.
When vaccination rates are high, even people who can’t get vaccinated (because they are too young or have weakened immune systems) have some protection. When vaccination rates are lower, everyone is at greater risk.
The overall vaccination rate on Kauai is greater than 95 percent. The vaccinated children are protecting the unvaccinated children by this herd immunity as there are far fewer of these diseases going around, but if one of these very contagious diseases like measles or whooping cough or even bacterial meningitis arrives in a small, closed community like a school and a large number of students are not vaccinated, the disease can spread very quickly.
Most diseases are particularly frightening in children under the age of one and when siblings come home from school with these diseases, they can easily spread them to these young vulnerable babies. Neither parents nor physicians ever forgets taking care of a small baby with whooping cough.
The babies may turn blue with coughing. You wait anxiously for the coughing to stop and the pink color to return and then you wait again for the next frightening coughing episode. Whooping cough in very young infants is particularly frightening as it may cause death.
We have more than a million tourists per year from all of the world, our potential exposure to diseases is high. We had a measles epidemic in 1984, we had a mumps epidemic in 2017, and we regularly have small outbreaks of whooping cough. Because the herd immunity is pretty good on Kauai, these diseases usually result in a small cluster and then fade away.
If and when the herd immunity is not good, these diseases can spread rapidly. It should also be noted that you can get a disease even with vaccination.
The MMR, for example, fully protects 97 percent of those who have had two shots. Three percent could still get measles if they were exposed. The 3 percent are also protected by high immunization rates.
A concern expressed by parents is that vaccines, particularly MMR, causes autism. This has been studied extensively and there is no evidence for this. The most recent reassuring study is out of Denmark and was reported in March of 2019. The researchers followed over 650,000 children.
They tracked over 14 years the 95 percent who had been immunized with MMR vs those who had not been immunized. There was no difference in the incidence of autism in the two groups. This study was large enough that it could look at groups of children who might be at higher risk for autism, such as those with a sibling with autism.
There was no difference related to MMR vaccination in these children either. There are actually 17 other studies in various countries with similar findings.
The number of vaccinations given by age 2 has increased and this is concerning to many parents. The number of vaccinations given by age 2 has increased from 5 in 1980 to 26 in 2012.
What is not well known is that the number of antigens, which are substances in the vaccine that cause disease resistance and possible reactions, have gone from over 3000 in those 5 earlier vaccines to about 150 in all 26 vaccines given today. The reason is that the vaccinations have been greatly purified. There is actually much less fever and fussiness after these newer vaccines.
Mercury and aluminum in the vaccinations is another hot topic. Because of concerns about mercury as a preservative in the vaccines, the AAP strongly supported its removal. It is no longer in any vaccine except for one type of flu vaccine. The concern was that mercury could be playing a role in the increasing number of children with autism and/or attention deficit disorders.
It was a reasonable theory, but unfortunately the rates of those disorders have not decreased since the removal some years ago. There are still very small amounts of aluminum in some vaccines as an additive. Aluminum is actually the most common naturally occurring metal on the planet and by six months of age a baby will have received much more aluminum from breast milk then from the shots.
When I was a toddler, people avoided going out in crowds because polio was rampant. Hospitals were filled with paralyzed people of all ages.
Patients were often so sick that they needed a new invention called an iron lung to help them breathe. Polio disappeared almost overnight when I was in kindergarten as the polio vaccine became available across the country and then across the world.
Good debate is important, but I am very concerned that the misinformation and distorted reporting in much of the anti-vaccination literature could return us to a world where diseases which are now rare could return. Please vaccinate your children.
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Lee A. Evslin, MD, was the former CEO of Kauai Medical Clinic and Wilcox Hospital. He recently served on the state-commissioned task force which examined pesticide use on Kauai.
Mahalo, Dr. Evslin, for sharing your well-considered views with Kauai. Anyone who knows you, or who was lucky enough to have you care for their children, knows that you are open-minded in your approach to medicine. You don’t just toe the mainstream line, so your support for vaccination is that much more convincing. Of course no one wants to expose their children to unnecessary risk, but the danger associated with these diseases if far greater than any potential risk from the vaccines.
Thank you for your kind words. It is a difficult subject and I think we all have become somewhat jaded by “science” being slanted for profit, but I can not get over or describe well enough how amazing it is to see terrible diseases virtually disappear in a matter of years. Another very frightening disease, I have not seen in 30 years due to the vaccine is epiglottis. This infection closes the windpipe of children and they can literally be brought in your office and die in your arms. I remember every moment of the last child I cared for with this. She did fine but certainly made us all very nervous.
Aloha Kakou,
Dr. Evslin…many of us believe you’re wrong about vaccines and misleading the herd.
After doctors sell vaccines for 40 years we would expect any M.D. to say nice things about vaccines.
Thanks for blowing the whistle on your counter parts in medicine and pharmaceuticals while defending pediatricians’ part in the $4 Trillion dollars a year take in medical care’s sale of drugs and vaccines.
Medical reliance on patient Blind Faith and patients’ ignorance of their own bodies and immune systems is typical of the medical profession ongoing iron fisted grip on enormously costly and profitable Disease Care in America. America is #1 in medical costs in the world, and #37th in the world in quality of care. Ouch, that needs a pain pill.
The developer Dr. Jonas Salk of the polio vaccine after years to study the effect of his vaccine claimed it gave more people polio than who would have gotten it without the vaccine. He also claimed polio was self limiting in the population and this was the reason for its downturn ocurence in the population not the vaccine.
Childhood exposure to the natural diseases of measles, mumps, and chicken pox provides a lifetime immunity, whereas vaccine immunity is only 20 years and later contraction of the disease is horrible compared to childhood infection.
How much time and money has the national pediatric group invested in finding the cause of so many childhood diseases that they are failing to prevent or even treat with results. Obesity, diabetes, Pre diabetic, too many cancers, Autism, Attention Deficit and Hyper Activity, asthma, etc.
So much more can be said in the understanding of disease and it’s Cause and Effect, that refutes what you say about vaccines, but it is late and and will save it for another time.
Charles
Fact check.
Statement in article: “the recommendations and safety monitoring of vaccines is watched over by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP is not for profit nor for sale.”
Fact. The two biggest vaccine makers Merck and Sanofi are listed as top corporate sponsors on the AAP web site.
https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/corporate-relationships/Pages/Friends-of-Children-Fund-President's-Circle.aspx
The AAP is for sale.
Beware of vaccine propaganda posted by those with a huge conflict of interest who deny it.
Read the vaccine package insert section ‘adverse events post-marketing’ to find out the truth vaccine hucksters are concealing. The FDA requires this information to be on package inserts but most doctors don’t know or will never tell you.
Here’s that info from Merck (AAP sponsor) FDA MMR’s package insert P7. FDA link below.
“Encephalitis; encephalopathy; measles inclusion body encephalitis (MIBE) (seeCONTRAINDICATIONS); subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE); Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS); acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM); transverse myelitis; febrile convulsions; afebrile convulsions or seizures; ataxia; polyneuritis; polyneuropathy; ocular palsies; paresthesia.”
https://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/UCM123789.pdf
Watch the AAP and vaccine trolls deny the existence of vaccine reactions the FDA requires to be on the MMR package insert.
Vaccinations are for the most part, a benefit from many diseases that would otherwise cause widespread suffering and injuries.
However this article needs to be clarified in the use of Mercury in the latest flue vaccine called Fluzone Quadrivalent which contains two dosage, the 0.25 ml dose has 12.5 mcg of mercury and the 0.5 ml dose has 25 mcg of mercury.
Also the same vaccine contains < or equal 50 mcg of Formaldehyde for the 0.25 dose and < or equal 100 mcg of Formaldehyde for the .5 dose. Mercury is a toxic metal that cause brain damage while Formaldehyde is used in embalming or preserving human or animal tissue, both are harmful to humans as well as documented in lab animal studies. This article is misleading in the notion that only ONE flu vaccination shot has mercury and aluminum as the above information comes directly from a clinic giving these shots as recently as a week ago here in Hawaii. Also, it is misleading to co-relate exclusively that babies get more aluminum from their mother's breast milk than the environment and fail to mention that the use of aluminum in preparing food is the most serious problem. Rice cookers that use aluminum along with cooking pans and pots to include aluminum in deodorant is suspected in causing not only nerve damage, but also Alzheimer disease. Another factor to consider is the wide spread use of Floride in toothpaste as well as in drinking water since chlorination (by product of the production of aluminum) of water is another factor to be concerned about since your State legislatures are considering wide spread of its use for drinking water. It was a known fact that the Nazi used chlorine for its concentration camps, not for the prevention of dental decay of its prisoners, but to control their aspirations and keeping them docile. Therefore Floride and Chlorine are both harmful for the development of the human capacity to engage in higher intelligence learning and comprehension. It is one way to keep the general public stupid to be more easily controlled and manipulated.
Thank you, that was the best article I have ever read about vaccines. I was not vaccinated as a child & my son has never had a shot. I do understand both sides but I will forever not believe in the system after my nephew got his second series of vaccines & had the scariest reaction. After we left the doctors he got violently ill and we had to pull over. Then he was flat for two weeks. He had no emotion & very little eye contact and after about 2 weeks he started coming out of what thought was an autistic transition. That day we did immediately call the doctor and instead of documenting the reaction for research they said “ oh I’m sure he just caught something in the waiting room” he will be fine. Sorry not a risk I would ever take. The blood brain barrier is not closed until a child is 3 years old, so I’ve read. So if you are going to vaccinate do it after 3 years old.