Perpetrator of Fraudulent Vaccine Scare Speaking in Stowe

Should he be allowed to speak?

The most prominent speaker at a “Hope and Healing” event to be held next week in Stowe, VT is a despicable charlatan. Andrew Wakefield’s manipulation of test results to indicate a non-existent link between vaccines and autism made Time’s list of five great science frauds. More importantly, the hysteria he started and cynically exploits is partially responsible for a rise in preventable diseases. According to Time:

“…the General Medical Council in the U.K. revoked Wakefield’s medical license, citing ethical concerns over how he recruited the patients in the study as well as his failure to disclose that he was a paid consultant to attorneys representing parents who believed their children had been harmed by vaccines.[emphasis mine]”

Should he be allowed to speak? Yes; people who want to hear him have the right to do so. Free speech is not just for popular ideas.

Should he be speaking at Stowe High School, which, incidentally, does require its students to be vaccinated? That’s a tougher question but the answer is still Yes. The School is available for rent and this makes its auditorium an asset to the town outside of school hours. The school board should not be put in the position of deciding which opinions are allowed. Every opinion has opponents.

But what can we do to counter this harmful narrative?

1. Don’t pay to go to the event. According to organizer Chiropractor Bradley Rauch as quoted in The Stowe Reporter the money earned from the conference will go first to speaker fees and expenses. In other words, if you buy a ticket, you are helping to fund Wakefield’s campaign of misinformation. The website for the conference “All profits will go to charity…” However, one of the organizations in the list of charities, Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice does not appear to be a charity. Its website does not say it is a 501(c)3 or that donation are tax deductibles. The coalition IS a cosponsor of the event. So actually at least part of the profits are going to the sponsors despite the claim that “All profits will go to charity…”.
2. Be informed and help inform others. Bad ideas need to be countered with good ideas. I started this post with an ad hominem attack on Wakefield even though I generally deplore such attacks. However, it is relevant that his contribution to the study of autism (the subject he is speaking on) was a deliberate harmful fraud. The last part of this post is the argument for mandatory vaccination.
3. Don’t go to Bradley Rauch for medical services. According to The Stowe Reporter story, he is planning to open a clinic in Stowe to treat autism. I’m not suggesting a boycott to punish him for his ideas. I am saying that he has demonstrated terrible medical and ethical judgment in his choice of speakers so I wouldn’t want him treating anyone I care about.

The argument for mandatory vaccination which you won’t hear at the conference.

We used to have periodic epidemics of polio, smallpox, rubella and other diseases. Huge numbers of people were either killed outright or left badly damaged. When I went to grammar school a long time ago, there was usually at least one classmate in permanent braces as a result of polio. Not true anymore. Because of vaccines, smallpox has been eradicated and we no longer have to vaccinate against it; polio is almost there.

So why can’t people just decide for themselves whether their children should be vaccinated? Two obvious reasons are that parents don’t have an inherent right to risk the life and health of their children and that, especially in a society where many health costs are socialized, everyone else will have to pay for the disease that could have been prevented. But let’s put those two arguments aside.

There are always some people who cannot be given a particular vaccine, either because of a general medical condition or because they’re allergic to the ingredients of the vaccine. So long as everyone who can get vaccinated does, the risk to those who can’t get vaccinated is very low

According to the Wrold Health Organization paper Vaccination greatly reduces disease, disability, death and inequity worldwide (which is also the well-documented source for other assertions in this post):

“’Herd protection’ of the unvaccinated occurs when a sufficient proportion of the group is immune. The decline of disease incidence is greater than the proportion of individuals immunized because vaccination reduces the spread of an infectious agent by reducing the amount and/or duration of pathogen shedding by vaccinees, retarding transmission.” [footnotes deleted but available via the link]

Those who can’t be vaccinated need herd protection. Those who diminish the herd effect by refusing vaccination for themselves and their children are putting those who can’t be vaccinated at deadly risk.

Most vaccines are not 100% effective, even if they are always administered properly, which, of course, can’t be the case. However, so long as there is sufficient herd protection, there is very little risk for those few whose shots didn’t take for one reason or another. However, if there is a large enough group who just don’t get vaccinated, then those individuals for whom the vaccine didn’t work are at great risk.

California used to have very liberal laws on refusing vaccination. NOT vaccinating became a fad among the nominally well-educated health-food-eating citizens in affluent Marin County. In 2015, only 84% of that County’s students entering kindergarten were fully vaccinated according to the San Francisco Chronicle in a story about the ensuing measles outbreak. “Last year there were 61 measles cases in California — the highest since the disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. The state beat that number in the first month of this year.” California, seeing that there could easily be epidemics of more deadly diseases, has sensibly made it more difficult to avoid vaccination except for those who have a specific medical condition which would make a particular vaccination unsafe.

Part of the anti-vaccination hysteria comes from the falsified study by Wakefield. Because of the scare the article engendered, huge followup studies were done. That was easy because there is lots of vaccination. Absolutely no statistical or causal link has been found between any vaccination and autism. Nonetheless, the myth lives on.

The truth is that every vaccination does have some small risk. If it’s by injection, there’s a tiny chance of infection. There’s a very small chance that the vaccine, like anything else, can be contaminated. There’s an equally tiny risk that the recipient will have an undiagnosed allergy to the infection. Obviously new vaccines like the one for Zika have to be thoroughly tested and procedures can always be improved. We always must be aware new data can surface.

Ironically, as long as almost everyone else gets vaccinated, those who opt their families out of the very small risk of a tested vaccine get a free ride on the very herd protection they are compromising. Society can’t afford to let that happen. We can’t leave those who can’t get vaccinated or whose vaccine doesn’t work at risk. We can’t give preventable epidemics room to blossom. Some vaccinations must be mandatory. This is an example of a case where the needs of the society come before the needs of the individual and state compulsion is justified.