THE DEBATE OVER childhood vaccination has been in the news on and off for nearly a decade. In 2009 WIRED published a comprehensive cover story on the subject—An Epidemic of Fear—laying out the debate and analyzing how unjustified and unscientific thinking was fueling a growing anti-vaccine movement. As another wave of stories about vaccination dominate the media, we thought it was time to revisit our earlier coverage.
To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Off it is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the convertor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Of it as an "institute" who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor's attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: "Grab 'em and stab 'em." Recently, Carey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN's Larry King Live and singled out Of its vaccine, Rotate, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: "Greed." Thousands of people revile Off it publicly at rallies, on Web sites, and in books. Type pauloffit.com into your browser, and you'll find not Of its official site but an anti-Off its screed "dedicated to exposing the truth about the vaccine industry's most well-paid spokesperson." Go to Wikipedia to read his bio and, as often as not, someone will have tampered with the page. The section on Off its education was once altered to say that he'd studied on a pig farm in Toad Suck, Arkansas. (He's a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine).
Then there are the threats. Off it once got an email from a Seattle man that read, "I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!" Other bracing messages include "You have blood on your hands" and "Your day of reckoning will come." A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Of it, he knew where the doctor's two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Of its face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.
"I don't think he wanted to hurt me," Of it recalls. "He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil." Still, whenever Of it gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm's length before gingerly tearing it open. "I think about it," he admits. "Anthrax."
This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism's False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don't work, but often cause harm.
As a result, Of it has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it. McCarthy, an actress and a former Playboy centerfold whose son has been diagnosed with autism, is the best-known leader of the movement, but she is joined by legions of well-organized supporters and sympathizers.
This isn't a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It's a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma's blunders and PR missteps, from VOXEL to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you're not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a "debate" where there should be none.
In the center of the fray is Paul Off it. "People describe me as a vaccine advocate," he says. "I see myself as a science advocate." But in this battle — and make no mistake, he says, it's a pitched and heated battle — "science alone isn't enough ... People are getting hurt. The parent who reads what Jenny McCarthy says and thinks, 'Well, maybe I shouldn't get this vaccine,' and their child dies of His meningitis," he says, shaking his head. "It's such a fundamental failure on our part that we haven't convinced that parent."
Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children's diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California's affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).
Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort.
That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California's kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk. In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanent reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glans, an epidemiologist at Kaiser's Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. "This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases," Glans says.
"I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die," Off it says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. "So now I've changed it to 'when enough children start to die.' Because obviously, we're not there yet."
The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling." Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. "A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society," Sagan wrote of certain Americans' embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. "There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community."
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Hemophilia influenza type b caused His meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans — now regarded as a Third World problem — were a first world reality.
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