To Vaccinate … or not?

Sooooo….everyone knows the world has unfortunately split between two types of people, those who vaccinate their children and those who are against vaccinating their children. I know, most people would be like why? Why would one actually be against vaccinating their children? Is that why people are making a deal about the measles coming back? Rest assure these questions will be answered. But long story short… yes these statements are true. *Sighs*

In the beginning…

To start off, let me just talk about where it all started. On February 28, 1998, The Lancet, published an article titled, “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.” I know, it’s a long title that does not make quite much sense, or at least that’s what I thought. After reading the report, I am not going to lie, I didn’t quite understand the points that Wakefield was trying to make. But after reading another article, published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, their discussion of the study made Wakefield’s proposed argument much more clear. So here is the run down essentially of what happened.

Logistics

Wakefield conducted his study with 12 patients, 11 boys and 1 girl with an age range from 3-10 years old. Wakefield obtained this cohort as they were “referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder” (Eggerston). Essentially this means that these children we told to go to this specific hospital because they had really bad stomach pain (or more technically an inflammation of their digestive tract) and they were thought to have been developing normally but are now showings signs of going backwards essentially. The parents believe that their children were showing these signs because they had recently received the MMR vaccine. By the end of the study, Wakefield and his other colleges concluded that there may be factors, such as the vaccines, that caused both of these symptoms. Another article, published by the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, claimed that soon after Wakefield publish this article and conclusions, multiple scientists conducted epidemiological studies. These studies concluded different results leading to them refuting Wakefield’s original claim.

Wait, fraud?

So naturally, if scientists cannot reproduce the same results then something has to be fishy right? That’s what I thought too. So after digging a little harder, I saw that Wakefield had ulterior motives. Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that there was indeed fraud involved in Wakefield’s study. They ruled that the children who were involved in the study were carefully selected. (#Sketchy!) This is already a big no-no in the scientific community when doing a study as it is literally the first step in manipulating results to say what you want. They also found that his study had been funded by lawyers, the same lawyers who represented the patient’s parents. Curiously at this same time, some of the parents of the children just happened to be in lawsuits against vaccine manufactures (Eggertson). (Suspicious?) I mean how convenient does that sound, the parent’s are in a lawsuit and they obviously know that if Wakefield does “find” and “claim” a link then they’re going to win. Which could also mean if they win the lawsuit maybe Wakefield will get more money from them, leading to even more of a want for Wakefield to manipulate the results. Major red flags!

In response…

So, what happens from here? Well, unfortunately people still believe Wakefield even though all of these scientist and councils can straight up prove him wrong. Wakefield’s study has created a world of anti-vaxxers. More and more parents are deciding to not vaccinate their kids in response. So now, diseases that we almost completely have gotten rid of are now coming back. Because parents are making these decisions, we have now gained “hotspots” of these diseases. Places like Portland have declared an emergency over a measles outbreak. The situation only started with a few confirmed cases but by the end of that same week they had to declare an emergency as the confirmed cases grown to 19. There were 19 cases on Friday, 21 on Sunday and then 23 on Tuesday. All because people started stopped vaccinating. The worst part? Okay, maybe not the worse part. But a bad part is that this is happening close to home. In Asheville, just in 2018, there was a strong outbreak of the chicken pox. It became North Carolina’s worst chickenpox outbreak literally since the vaccine came out. So not only are the measles spreading which could be extremely deadly but the chickenpox are spreading which means more people are also now susceptible to shingles later in life. The thing that gets me is that more than two decades ago a vaccine was created to prevent all of this, but just because one false study was published (and has since been retracted) we now have to re-worry about these, what was almost eradicated, diseases.

Soo…. in short just vaccinate your kids!