Can We Come To Our Senses
Over Our Single Best Shot to Defeat Disease?

     "You wanna get a flu shot?"
    My wife asked me that innocent question across the breakfast table, and to my outraged amazement I found myself hesitating. Me! The editor of a book for young people on vaccines. The rationalist who puts stock in science above all else as a way of knowing. Somehow, the anti-vaccine chatter had slipped by my guard and infiltrated the primitive part of my brain.
    Fear is infectious.
    Two-thirds of Americans are unprepared to get a flu vaccine, according to a Consumer Reports poll. So are two-thirds of our normally calmer cousins to the north.
    The Canadian National Post laments, "Had something similar been in place during the 1918 flu emergency, it theoretically could have saved tens of millions of lives and staved off the greatest plague in human history. Why is it, then, that the large majority of Canadians seem more inclined to take their chances with the unpredictable new virus itself, than the vaccine that could shield them from it?"
    "Vaccines are dangerous!" So goes the claim, and there is a tiny fragment of truth to it. Anything you put in your body can be dangerous. Eating is dangerous. Once every few billion times an American eats beef, a virulent strain of e-coli goes down the gullet with it, and the unfortunate person sickens and possibly dies.
      While some uncertainty hovers over the adverse event statistics, there is no doubt that eating ground beef is about as risky as getting vaccinated, which is to say not much. The current e-coli infection rate is 1.12 in every 100,000 people, nicely comparable with the rate of serious reactions to vaccines at 1.71 in every 100,000 people.
    So where are the howling anti-beef mobs? Not that going vegetarian would eliminate e-coli infections. You can get one just as easily from organic, locally grown, union picked lettuce.
    The comparison only takes us so far, however. You have to eat, but you don't necessarily have to get a vaccination. You can just hope that your neighbors do. And that's where this whole fear-mongering anti-vaccination campaign turns really ugly.
    You see, a better comparison than beef might be fire-fighting. In the old days, before Benjamin Franklin organized fire-fighting as a business, if a house in the village caught fire, everyone would turn out to form a bucket brigade -- well, nearly everyone.
     This looked pretty altruistic, but the unstated rationale was that if you let a fire burn out of control, it might spread to your house and all the other structures in the village. But fire-fighting can be dangerous, even fatal. So, if a craven wretch cowers in his home and lets his neighbors put out the fire, he reaps the benefit and runs no risk -- other than to be called a coward if he is found out.
    The situation is much the same with vaccines. If enough people get immunized the cowards get the benefit without running any risk, provided there aren't too many cowards in the village.
    At present, we seem to be overstocked with them. However, they don't like to be viewed as selfish and craven, so they are busy trying to make it seem somehow noble to stand up against vaccines.
     "I refuse to be a guinea pig!" one woman told the National Post in the story quoted above.
    But as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, points out, you take your chances either way. The odds are by no means 50-50.
    "Thirty-six thousand people a year die of seasonal flu. There is no way that 36,000 people die from vaccines. The numbers are strikingly different," he said.
    Meantime, HBO talk show host Bill Maher seems to be embarrassed to find himself the national spokesperson for the anti-vaccine crowd. In a rambling, apologetic Huffington Post piece, he says, on the one hand, "Vaccination is a nuanced subject, and I've never said all vaccines in all situations are bad," but on the other hand, "Is it worth it to get vaccines for every bug that goes around? Injecting something into my bloodstream? I'd like to reserve that for emergencies. This is the flu, and there's always a flu. I've said it before, America is a panicky country."
    Only someone living in a nation where immunization is abundant could make a flippant remark like that. From 1900 to 2000 life expectancy in America rose by about 50 percent to roughly 75 years. The main reason for the rise was the elimination of infectious diseases as a major contributor to mortality. Vaccines were not the only weapon in the battle (sanitation and antibiotics come to mind), but they were and remain  among the most important.
     Before vaccines were available, nearly every family lost a child to disease. It happened to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House. It happened to millions of ordinary Americans. And it will happen again if we let this paranoid pseudoscientific nonsense run rampant. Our antibiotic and antiviral drugs are nowhere near effective enough to extinguish an epidemic. Only the body's immune system, with its billions of years of evolved defenses, can do that job. For it to protect all of us, rather than a lucky few, our immune systems must be properly primed.
     I cannot tell you that the flu vaccine will do no harm to anyone. Of course, for some unfortunate people, it will -- as will driving to work, breathing in the vicinity of someone who has just coughed, and reading this essay while leaning back every so slightly in a chair. That's life.
    There is, however, one immunization that you can take with absolutely no risk -- guaranteed. What's more, it can be self-administered. You can vaccinate against irrational fears with a simple dose of reason. Go ahead -- inoculate yourself out!