The best way to deal with disease and public health crises like epidemics and pandemics is prophylactically–an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. Which is why vaccinations are one of the best tools we have in preventing illnesses from spreading.

Perhaps it was the eight years of the flat-earth, creationist, global-warming-is-a-myth Bush Administration that turned anti-science craziness into accepted/acceptable behavior. Like most progressives, I prefer to adjudicate the reactionary behaviors of the nation to the right–particularly the extremist right.

The problem with the anti-vaccine movement, however, is it’s equal opportunity anti-science craziness. When else can you hear two people as seemingly on opposite ends of the political spectrum as Bill Maher and Glenn Beck being proponents of the same lunatic attitudes? When the topic of vaccines is raised.

Bill Maher has told his audiences for weeks now that anyone who gets the H1N1 vaccine is “an idiot” while Glenn Beck has posited that no one really needs the vaccine because the disease isn’t that bad. Beck’s suggested “chicken pox parties” (this is where a bunch of sick people get healthy people in the room with them and make them sick, too, thereby–allegedly–innoculating them against a disease). Both men have implied that the vaccination “frenzy” as both have termed it is another attempt by government to interfere in our lives.

What utter anti-science nonsense. As HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted today on ABC news, she prefers to get her science from scientists.

I could not agree more.

What makes everyone think they are scientists now? When, for example, did we decide it was okay to give people like Beck, Maher and former MTV model/host Jenny McCarthy medical credentials?

Maher is a member of The Reason Society which implies something more than just an anti-religious group since the word “reason” is in the title.

Meanwhile, Beck dropped out of Yale after one semester. McCarthy, who claims all vaccines cause autism–a rumor/fixation that has been soundly debunked by science–has written a book about how chelation therapy cures autism (it doesn’t) and has toured the U.S. and other countries telling women not to vaccinate their children.

The major proponents of the anti-science movement which has fixated on vaccines (for now) are not the usual suspects as Maher’s inclusion in this grouping suggests. In fact, they are largely upper-middle-class and well-educated white people who truly believe that vaccines will harm their children. Why they believe a former Playboy model over scientists is inexplicable, but irrationality always is.

The majority of deaths currently from H1N1 have been in children under 16. Unlike most influenza strains which hit the elderly and immuno-compromised most directly, this one mostly impacts children. The current medical theory for this is that it’s a new virus and thus children haven’t yet been exposed to the strains within the strain that is H1N1. They have no immunity. Unless they get the vaccine. 

The major thing separating the developed world and the developing world is medicine and science. Early vaccinations  prevent diseases that used to kill upwards of a third of all children before they turned five–measles, mumps, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus–these diseases killed otherwise healthy children on a regular basis. Smallpox has been virtually eradicated in the world through vaccinations. So has polio.

For more than a decade scientists have been working intensively to find vaccines for HIV/AIDS and malaria–diseases that kill millions worldwide. Why? Because we know emperically that vaccines are our best defense against the kind of epidemic/pandemic scourges that have, at different points in historical time, wiped out large portions of the planet.

In any given year influenza kills about 36,000 in the U.S. We don’t usually hear about this because the strains of flu that we have become used to aren’t new and the majority of deaths are among those in already compromised health, particularly the elderly. Why we are hearing so much about H1N1 is because this strain is disproportionately impacting young, healthy people and pregnant women. Several pregnant women have died from the virus.  

Those pundits who are touting the anti-science perspective on vaccines are all themselves vaccinated. And because they were vaccinated, they have lived well into middle age–only to tell others not to be vaccinated.

But it’s not just among celebrities that the anti-science/anti-vaccine movement has gained traction. New vaccines for meningitis and for HPV have met with vociferous response from parents and religious leaders, many of whom protest these vaccines on moral and religious grounds.

The HPV vaccine prevents human papilloma virus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. HPV has also been implicated in other cancers. The optimal time for vaccination is in prepubescence, before either girls or boys (the CDC now recommends HPV vaccination for boys as well as girls) become sexually active, since HPV is most commonly transmitted through sexual activity.

While it’s difficult for those of us who are not anti-science to imagine anyone not wanting to protect their children from potential cancer, the argument against the HPV vaccine is that it “promotes sexual activity” by giving kids permission to have sex.

Sound insane? It is. HPV vaccine guards against cancer.  

According to the CDC:

Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and another 6.2 million people become newly infected each year. At least 50% of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives.

HPV is commonly linked to cervical cancer, but it is also the main cause of seven other cancers, including anal cancer in women and men and penile cancer.

The reasons for not getting children vaccinated against meningitis are even more sketchy. Meningitis is commonly transmitted in close quarters like college dorms by close personal contact and kissing. It is most often a disease of people under 25.

Yet meningitis is a proven killer. An infection of the membranes that protect the brain and spine, meningitis can kill–and does. Often those infected are dead within 24 hours while others can end up with gangrene and lose limbs. In January 1,900 children were killed in Ethopia  in a meningitis outbreak. In the U.S. the disease usually will effect one or two  kids in an elementary or high  school, as many as ten at a college, but with vaccination the fear of these outbreaks would be minimal.

The anti-science argument is that there are two sides to vaccines and that the pro-vaccine side has been overstated. How can you prove a negative, argues one anti-vaccine website for parents which also argues that “a few childhood infections” are no big deal. But no one is vaccinated against diseases that are “childhood infections.” Vaccines are developed for diseases that have become or have the potential to become public health emergencies, disease that either kill or do significant permanent damage.  

Suggesting that those who are anti-vaccine have as valid an argument as the science  of vaccines is like presenting a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust denier and saying they each have valid points. And yet there are magazines like “Balanced Living” that give point-by-point refutations on how vaccines are unnecessary and themselves more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.

Wrong.

These are people who never saw a child with diptheria or measels because those diseases have largely been eradicated in the developed world–through vaccines. But diptheria previously killed 15 percent of the children who contracted it and measels killed as many as 30 percent of those who were infected. We all know how devastating polio was on the population. Many children and adults died while others–like President Franklin Roosevelt–were permanently disabled.  

Are there problems with vaccines? Occasional, just as there are with all medications. Some of those adverse effects can be serious, but they are also few. In 10 million vaccinations for H1N1 there has not been a single serious adverse incident past sore injection sites or runny noses from inhalation vaccines, while just last week there were 22 deaths of children from H1N1. 

The perils of not vaccinating are well-documented. Every year we hear of evangelical churches that disallow the children of their memberships vaccinations and the subsequent outbreaks of measels that kill a handful of children.

Here’s what’s so outrageous:  The anti-science lobby (and those celebrities who support it) in the U.S. (Europe seems not to have fallen under the spell of  this voodoo)has well-educated parents risking their childrens’ lives–and the lives of their childrens’ peers–by refusing/refuting science.  Yet what is preventing children in the developing world from living into adulthood is lack of vaccines and other medical care which these American parents eschew.

Here’s an increasingly consistent scenario: Upper middle class parents don’t vaccinate their child against measels. The child gets–fortunately–a mild case and recovers with no lasting impairment. But then while that child is sick–and measels is a highly communicable disease—other children too young to be vaccinated are exposed to this sick child and those children get very sick and possibly die.

That’s how epidemics start. Exposure without immunity. Vaccines provide immunity. Just like science provides immunity to irrationality.

I expect anti-science lunacy from someone like Glenn Beck. But Bill Maher knows better. The same guy who did “Religulous” seems to have his own streak of irrationality.

Fear of vaccines is like fear of spiders–it’s irrational and it harkens back to our most superstitous roots. Promoting or fueling that fear isn’t just an alternative viewpoint–it’s dangerous. It may not be the same as holding a gun to someone’s head, but the peril of healthy adults who grew up vaccinated arguing that their children and other people’s children should not be vaccinated is that children will die when they don’t have to. And if that’s not a crime, it should be.—VAB