The Efficacy of Vaccines is Not Debatable

Trump and RFK Jr. Want to Have a Debate on Vaccines; They Should Lose It. Badly.

Take a really good look at this picture. This is a genuine photograph that was taken in the early 1900s by Dr. Allan Warner of the Isolation Hospital at Leicester in the UK.

Both of these boys are the same age. They came from the same village, they drank from the same well on the same day. The boy on the left became infected with smallpox. The boy on the right did not, because he was vaccinated. His vaccination is the only reason there was no worry about taking this photo because there was no real chance of infection due to his vaccine. Dr. Warner took several photos like this demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccinations. In this one below, they were two sisters (21 and 15) exposed to the smallpox virus on the same day, but only one had been vaccinated in infancy:

Here’s another one. Sisters, both girls were infected by the same person at the same time. The girl on the right was vaccinated 12 days prior.

And I love the story of this one. A 14 year old boy came home with smallpox. The father took him immediately to the hospital and consented to have everyone else in the family vaccinated, including their toddler. The father, already exposed and too late to get vaccinated himself, agreed to be a test for the doctors and soon developed smallpox. Twelve days later, this is how he and his child looked:

The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine created, identified by Edward Jenner in 1796; vaccines have been around almost as long as the United States has been a country. The science was absolutely sound as well; many at the time had known that those infected with cowpox (a similar disease but far less virulent and almost never fatal) never got smallpox. Jenner was the first to essentially use the cowpox virus to innoculate against smallpox. At a time where 10% of the population usually died of smallpox (20% in more rural towns that used the same wells and water sources), smallpox declined until the 1970s when it was named the first disease eradicated globally.

All because of vaccines.

Take a look at all of those pictures again. In the early 20th century legislators in the United Kingdom faced growing pressure from anti-vaccination groups. The boys and girls were both members of the same town, the same social class, and in the case of the girls the same family. The ONLY difference, were that those that became infected by the virus had not been vaccinated because their parents got swept up in anti-vaccination fervor at the time. The pictures were used to demonstrate the effectiveness of vaccinations and promote public health innoculations.

Here’s a picture of two young kids in iron lungs because they were afflicted with polio. Jonas Salk created a mass marketed vaccine in the 1950s that he put into the public domain because saving lives was more important than money. You know what you don’t see anymore? Iron lungs. Oh, and polio.

Since then, the use of vaccines have helped practically eradicate smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diptheria and whooping cough from the world. They’ve minimized the consequences of hepatitis, tetanus, rabies, chicken pox, shingles, and most recently COVID. Vaccines are one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. For most of these diseases, you only hear of them when a very rare outbreak occurs, usually due to someone choosing not being vaccinated getting the virus and spreading it around.

But as with all things, when you don’t see them every day, you don’t think of them as threats. In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield pubilished a paper in the scientific journal “The Lancet” claiming that the Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccine was linked to causing autism. With autism rates rising, this seemed like a reasonable connection requiring further testing and consideration. But correlation is not causation, and the paper was easily proven false multiples times over. Twelve years later the Lancet retracted the article. Nonetheless, the paper sparked a movement inside affluent western communities to refuse to have their children vaccinated and to campaign against school mandated vaccinations. One of those that took up the mantle of anti-vaccination was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the son of the liberal former Attorney General and nephew to JFK.

In the past twenty years, vaccine approval has dropped from 98% in the US (which is practically universal, everyone LOVED vaccines; try and get 98% of Americans to agree on anything!) to a mere 67% today. Just in the last five years, the approval has dropped 15 points! What is the cause of all this antipathy toward the greater good?

1. Those that promote anti-vaccination agendas usually come from affluent areas, which means parents with large microphones.¹ These are the people most likely to make a cause and show up at local city hall and school board meetings to rant about perceived wrongs. Some may have children with autism and want to blame someone for it. This disconnect, where those promoting a cause, blaming something with broader application than their individulal interest, and utterly removed from most all the people infected by the disease, causes the sentiment to fester.² Some of the largest outbreaks of formally controlled diseases have occured in white, progressive, affluent neighborhoods and private schools.

2. “Healthy lifestyles” are extremely popular right now, and almost always relate to a level of purity as to what we ingest and include into our bodies. As the healthy lifestyle continues to become a familiar way of life, people are more hesitant about injecting vaccines into their bodies. Many vaccines are actually weakened forms of the virus, meant to create a positive immunoresponse to it, preventing future infections. However, to many in the healthy lifestyle community, the very nature of this is counterintuitive. Why inject a healthy person with a virus, weakened or not?

3. COVID led people to really resent vaccine mandates. COVID was a novel virus that when it first became endemic seemed fatal to most who got it. Unhealthy and untreated infected persons almost always needed ventilators and died. The lack of testing meant there was no telling who had the virus and who they can pass it to. The speed of which it spread, along with the lack of hospital space, workers, and ventilators, required measures to slow the spread of the virus; this meant shutting most things in public life down including schools, and preventative steps like social distancing, masks and consistent wiping surfaces down with disinfectants. People worked remotely or not at all, and there was little to do. The trendlines of infection rates strongly correlated with when people socialized; in summer the rates surged, epidemiologists often tracked “super-spreader” events that boosted rates and the upticks and downticks in the rates almost always reflected when restrictions were loosened or tightened. Nonetheless, being cooped up for nearly two years left people a little stir crazy.

4. Donald Trump was and still is an inadequate messenger on the issue who has chosen to politicize the issue. To his credit, he started “Operation Warp Speed,” a government initiative to reduce red tape to get a vaccination created and put out into the public as soon as possible. Within a year, there was a vaccination that led to everything opening up again. He now disassociates himself with that effort and blames his heads of NIH and CDC as villains in the whole COVID era. During the crisis, he advocated snake oil cures such as hydroxycholoroquine (an anti-milarial drug that has no impact on COVID) and Ivermectin, which was a drug used on livestock as a dewormer. He claimed his immunity was strong and that he wouldn’t get tested, then came down with the virus and spread it among his staff and Biden’s after a debate during this time. Trump maintains an adamantly strong following, and to those who resented the closures, his obstinancy against vaccination was and still is music to their ears. The reduction in approval of vaccines the last five years is almost entirely attributable to the adoption of this stance within the Republican Party.

RFK, Jr, was Trump’s appointed Health and Human Services Cabinet Secretary, and he will be up for nomination hearings in the coming weeks. If confirmed, he is likely to eliminate federal mandates on vaccinations and leave it up to local public health and government officials. Trump has realized there are votes to be had and his supporters are easily influenced to go along with him on this issue. He wants to turn this into a debate on vaccinations. There is no debate; vaccinations work and keep us all safe.

This is serious. One of the ways we maintain very low rates of these diseases is through “herd immunity.” The concept is that if everyone is immunized, then the disease never gets a foothold in a community and can’t spread. But if there is an unimmunized group, not only can it take root and spread, it can continue into undervaccinated populations as well. This is how, of all things, measles outbreaks have been popping up recently across the country, when it should be practically non-existent.

Familiarity breeds complacency. Our vaccinated world has become way too familiar, and people seem intent on saying that we can do away with them and nothing bad will happen. That we never really needed them to begin with. This level of ignorance comes with consequences. If you want to see just how big those consequences can be, just look at just one person from Dr. Warner’s photos:

Same man three days apart:

Same man, thirteenth day. He died one hour after the photo was taken.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

In 1885, Louis Pasteur was approached by a mother whose son, Joseph Meister, had been bitten by a rabid dog, and who now showed signs of contracting rabies. Pasteur soon after invented a rabies vaccine and saved the boys life, even though this was against the law at the time since Pasteur was not a medical doctor, but a chemist.

As an adult, Meister served as a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute until his death in 1940 at age 64. On 24 June 1940, ten days after the German army occupied Paris during World War II, Meister committed suicide, stating he chose to take his life rather than allow the Wehrmacht to enter the Pasteurs' crypt.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

From the first contraction of the virus, to the day the Moderna mRNA vaccine was created was the fastest an effective vaccine was made available in history. It is one of the singular most impressive scientific achievements of the 21st century so far.

It’s a shame that too few appreciate it.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. It’s an odd corallary that most outbreaks start in immigrant communities or from travelers returning from overseas, where their place of origin do not mandate vaccinations. Sadly, this is also a source of anti-immigrant sentiment as well, as many immigrants lack the insurance or knowledge of how to get them and their kids vaccinated.

2. As an added bonus, it is also a source of anti-immigration sentiment as well.