The rise of the Anti Vaccine Era

So in the previous chapters, I introduced vaccines along with a little history. I also showed how vaccines over the century has a made a huge impact on life expectancy. Vaccines in general have had a grave influence on public health world wide. Today we are going to talk about this new rise of parents who are refusing to vaccinate their children because of a fraudulent scientific paper that came out 16 years ago. We will look at what started the controversy and how celebrities and public figures have paved the way to how parents approach vaccines.

 Who is Andrew Wakefield and why do we care about him?
 

Andrew Wakefield

Andrew Wakefield is a former British doctor who published a fraudulent research paper that linked the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine to autism.Which as you can imagine caused a scare and controversy. Then researchers tried to reproduce 
Dr. Wakefield's findings and they found that they were unable to link the vaccine to autism. As you can imagine Dr. Wakefiled got a lot of heat, they found out he was financially bribed and they discredited his research. They also found that he broke a lot of ethical rules while conducting his research. So now basically Wakefield is not a doctor anymore who lost all of credibility. Nevertheless, it took about 12 years to discredit Wakefield.

Dr. Wakefield's research 

Andrew Wakefield's paper

The BMJ or the British Medical Journal published an article that disclosed the reasons as to why Andrew Wakefield conducted fraudulent research. This picture to the left is a copy of the first page of Wakefield's paper.  The article written by the BMJ said that his research was clearly fabricated and that it was not due to Dr. Wakefield being incompetent. The BMJ said that "A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. The panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards". (BMJ 2011;342:c7452) The BMJ clearly believes that Wakefield was dishonest. Also the article mentioned that Wakefield was funded by various institutions and that he was publishing the article for financial gain. This scare led to a global scare and according to the BMJ "vaccination rates in the United Kingdom have recovered slightly from their 80% low in 2003 but they are still below the 95% level recommended by the World Health Organization to ensure herd immunity. In 2008, for the first time in 14 years, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales. Hundreds of thousands of children in the UK are currently unprotected as a result of the scare, and the battle to restore parents’ trust in the vaccine is ongoing." (BMJ 2011;342:c7452)  Obviously this fraudulent research caused a very big problem and now has added to a public health risk. 

 How Wakefield's research triggered a dangerous cascade. 

Modern social media like instagram and twitter where celebrities are followed by millions and millions of people worldwide can be very dangerous when it comes to disease prevention. And not because diseases can be passed through social media. But because ideas can. Like the idea of vaccine refusal.  

So for example if Kim Kardashian who currently has around 19 million people following her, decided that a certain vaccine is not good for her baby North. That information will be passed down to whoever follows Kim and then it will be watched on television by fans and then ultimately Kim will end up going on The View and explaining to moms across America, why vaccines are bad. (God forbid). But this is exactly what has happened, celebrity parents or high profile people like Jenny McCarthy have built campaigns that discredit certain vaccines. 

What will happen if millions of people stop vaccinating their children?

 There will be pandemics that would be really difficult to stop. People will die from diseases that are preventable and eventually everyone would die. 

  

 Again this is a graph of how vaccines help keep diseases under control.

And just remember when you wake up and go outside every morning that you do not get sick because everyone around you has most likely been vaccinated. But where does that leave this new new generation? 

  


 









  First Image:

http://www.cmaj.ca/content/182/4/E199/F1.large.jpg

Second Image: http://seducehealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/people-magazine-e1296676978256.jpeg

Third Image: 

http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/404580/field_highwire_fragment_image_l/0.jpg

Fourth Image: 
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fhistory-world.org%2Fblack_death.htm&h=0&w=0&sz=1&tbnid=Un5ZR7rJdjTGxM&tbnh=194&tbnw=259&zoom=1&docid=eZjBTtMUyGuiqM&ei=Syk_UuiQAZCg4APLt4HwAg&ved=0CAUQsCU

Fifth Image: http://www.whale.to/vaccine/New%20Picture%20%284%29.jpg

sixth image: http://australiansceptics.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/pertussis-graph.jpg

Seventh image: http://www.thepaltrysapien.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Herd_Immunity_Crop.jpg