Shots in the Dark

Attempts at eradicating infectious diseases are putting our children at risk
As published in The Next City, Summer 1999
By Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center
http://www.909shot.com

THE WORLDWIDE ACCEPTANCE OF MASS VACCINATION TO SUPPRESS INFECTIOUS childhood diseases - once fiercely resisted - is one of the most successful public relations stories in the history of medicine. As a result, epidemics of smallpox, which once swept through 18th- and 19th-century port cities such as Halifax, New York, and Boston without warning and cut down entire families, are now dry facts relegated to medical books. Images of children struggling through whooping cough, walking down the street coughing spasmodically, and stopping at curbs to spit up sticky mucus are only fading memories for grandparents alive to talk about what their parents told them. Baby boomers and their parents still remember lining up in school in 1955 for polio vaccinations, with the hope that this magic bullet would keep them out of the dreaded iron lung.
Mass vaccination has dramatically suppressed childhood diseases. In Canada, recorded diphtheria cases dropped from 9,000 in 1924 to two to five by 1994. When measles vaccination began in the United States between 1963 and 1965, doctors reported more than 400,000 cases annually; by 1995, that number had dwindled to 309. Cases of tetanus are almost unheard of in North America and Europe. Yet the universal use of vaccines as a worthy goal that prevents needless suffering and that benefits all mankind has begun to be challenged.

The voices of critics are heard in the living rooms of families whose children have been injured or have died from reactions to routine childhood vaccinations, and in courtrooms, where parents are suing vaccine makers and challenging mandatory vaccination laws. In the U.S. Congress, legislators who have heard them have set up a vaccine injury compensation program. At scientific conferences and in the pages of prestigious medical journals, researchers and physicians are risking their careers by discussing vaccine side effects. On network TV, millions are watching parents, who say vaccines hurt their children, square off with policy makers, who say vaccines rarely hurt anyone at all.

At the heart of the controversy lies a scientific challenge to the very premise that mass vaccination with multiple vaccines safely and effectively controls diseases and improves individual and public health. Simultaneously, ethical and legal arguments challenge the right of government health officials to force vaccination on everyone. Wrapped up in this scientific, legal, and political battle are beleaguered pediatricians losing the trust of parents and a booming pharmaceutical industry with billions of dollars invested in new vaccine development.