Inoculating against idiocy
Last week, measles hit Toronto. Measles. In 2015, getting infected with measles strikes me as about as likely as getting pancaked by a Model T or bumping into Warren G. Harding at the movies. And yet, here we are: Four adults and two children diagnosed in Toronto, another recent case reported in Niagara and a mounting wave of confused hysteria that, yes, somehow, people are still getting measles.
The local measles uptick comes after an outbreak Stateside, believed to have originated in or around the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, Calif. It’s more fuel for the fires stoking the current debate around vaccinations, and whether today’s modern parent should bother with the outmoded, fuddy-duddy practice of immunizing their vulnerable children against virulent diseases.
Students at Queen’s University have raised concerns over professor Melody Torcolacci, whose Physical Determinants of Health class floats the disproven idea that vaccinations are tied to disability and chronic illness in children (“She is a crock,” reads one particularly scathing appraisal on the website Rate My Professor). Recently, New Jersey governor and potential U.S. presidential candidate Chris Christie called for “balance” in the argument about child vaccinations, stating that “parents need to have some measure of choice” in the matter.
Maybe it’s superfluous to claim that Christie, a man who delusionally believes that he’s a personal friend of Bruce Springsteen’s, is wrong about something but, well, Chris Christie is wrong. And Melody Torcolacci is wrong. And the 20 per cent of Ontarians who, according to a recent poll, still believe in some link between inoculation and child autism are wrong. And everyone who doesn’t vaccinate their children is dead wrong.
There is no need for “balance.” There is no reason for “choice.” Because believing in anti-vaccination is an indefensible position.
The benefit of vaccinating yourself against infectious diseases isn’t a theory or proposition or a position. It’s a fact. There’s no reason to even “debate” the issue. Debating vaccination versus antivaccination is like debating whether 2 + 2 = 4 or whether Hooch was the dog in Turner & Hooch.
Look at a graph charting reported cases of measles in the United States. It’s like looking at the first pitch of an especially terrifying roller coaster. Following the introduction of the vaccine in 1963, cases of measles dropped from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands. (Reporting in Canada was a bit spottier for the years immediately following the vaccine’s licensing, but the general downslope remains consistent.)
Debating vaccination is like debating climate change — another verifiable fact that, according to a 2013 Guardian report, was backed by around 97 per cent of the scientific community. Similarly, the MMR vaccine that defends against measles, mumps and rubella is considered to be 95-per-cent effective, an overwhelming number. (One of the cases reported in Toronto afflicted someone who was fully vaccinated, one of those exceptions-that-prove-the-rule type things.)
While the essence of democracy may well be lively, spirited, productive deliberation over issues of major public importance, there’s no great virtue in blowing hot air over something that can be safely taken for granted. Like, say, the truism that immunization against infectious, potentially fatal diseases is a good thing. The call for debate, discussion, consideration, balance and choice often serves to bogusly validate the seriousness of the so-called “anti-vaxxers.” Sometimes putting a notion on the proverbial table validates its specious right to even be there. It makes unserious ideas — or moronic or dangerous ones — seem totally vital and significant.
And the cost of lending some appearance of seriousness to the anti-vaxxers’ ideas is perilously steep. To achieve “herd immunity” — the minimum level of immunization in a given population to stop the spread of a particular illness, estimated between 83 and 94 per cent in the case of measles — requires that the vast majority of us work together. When inoculations dip below that threshold, many more people are prone to get sick. Herd immunity fundamentally changes the algebra of personal “choice.” Because where the unvaccinated are protected by the vaccinated, the opposite is not true.
If some freethinking adult wants to live in some hovel up in the hills and slowly die of rubella then, well, that’s their prerogative. But this freedom ends where mine, or anyone else’s, freedom begins. You don’t have a right to get other people sick.
Likewise, while anyone technically has the right to advocate against vaccination, such dangerously wrong-headed, totally counterfactual garbage doesn’t automatically deserve to be accepted, or even tolerated. You can’t contest facts, or even high probabilities. Two and two is four. Medicine is good. Hooch was the dog.