I believe in vaccination. Who cares,
right? Whether you care or not, I'm going to add my voice to the din
surrounding the vaccine debate. Or, as I like to call it, immunization fact versus fiction. I am so confident that this post is going to be
hugely popular and widely disseminated (hint, hint) that I am going
to take a moment to address my qualifications. For those readers
that don't know me personally, I am a Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD), as
well as a Board Certified Pharmacotherapy Specialist (BCPS). Not to
toot my own horn, but I am particularly proud of that BCPS part
because I had to work very hard to get those four little letters.
You know how Christina Yang is a Board Certified Cardiothoracic
Surgeon? It's kinda like that, but with drugs. I'm a medication
therapy expert. (You should now be very impressed and ignore the
fact that I still use inelegant words like “kinda.”)
As I was saying, I am a medication
therapy expert. In fact, I'm one of those lying, condescending
experts who think they know more than regular people about
vaccination. I hang with a whole bunch of other highly qualified medication therapy experts who also think vaccination is a super idea for almost everyone. Like all experts these days, I get most of my current
events information via the most reliable data clearinghouse in the history of mankind—Facebook. Just kidding. But, after I shared some particularly
thought-provoking (or maybe just provoking) posts on the anti-vaxxer
movement, one of my FB friends challenged me very nicely in a private
message. In short, this friend expressed concern that my posts had
seemed more condescending than convincing. What follows is an expanded version of
my response. (I have not checked yet to see if we are still
friends...)
First, choosing not
to vaccinate, does not just affect a single family. It affects,
potentially everyone that family comes into contact with, and who
they come into contact with, and everyone they, in turn, come into
contact with, and everyone....you get the point. Mind you, I am a
proud American, and strongly believe in the rights of the individual. I believe individual rights prevail—right up to the point
that they collide with ANOTHER PERSON'S individual rights. If I, in exercising one of my rights deprive you of one of yours, guess what!
It is no longer an inherent right. I just can't for the life of me
see why vaccination is any different than requiring a child to receive
an education, or requiring parents to provide proper food and shelter.
A parent's right is subordinate to the rights of children and society
as a whole, on these responsibilities. That is the trade-off for living in
civilization. Children have a right to the best medical care
available to them, and every citizen has a right to be as safe as
possible from preventable diseases.
The second point is this: the
reasoning behind most of the information out there against vaccinating is scientifically unsound. Period. Taking the same
arguments that are supposed to convince me that vaccination is bad, and applying them to
something like using car seats illustrates that fact pretty clearly.
Unfortunately, the average person does not have sufficient background
in statistics, epidemiology, virology, immunology, genetics, biochemistry, infectious disease, and pathophysiology to fully understand how vaccines work, or how to
interpret the research demonstrating that they do. Now I'm sure THAT
sounds condescending, but I assure you it is not. Let me explain. I
spent 6 years in school and over $120,000 getting a doctorate, worked
my butt off every free moment for those six years learning to
understand all of those things I just listed. Does that make me
smarter or better than someone who did not pursue the same course of
study? Of course not. It makes me fluent in a language that can not be learned in any other way—the language of modern medicine.
Most of us would not make a potentially fatal decision based on information presented in a language we do not know, nor would we trust the advice of someone who doesn't know that language any better than we do. I certainly would make damn sure the person I choose as an interpreter is completely literate in that language before making such an important choice. Why, then, do we suppose someone without proper training and experience has any right to advise us on vaccination?
I would want an EXPERT. Say it with
me—EX. PERT. It is not a swear word. When in God's name did it
become a character flaw to work hard at something, become an
authority on that thing, and then share your expertise? It makes no
sense. If you are 12 miles up in the air, don't you want to be in a plane that
has been built by experts, maintained by experts and flown by
experts? Is it then condescending for those experts to insist you to
defer to their superior knowledge and experience regarding the care
and use of airplanes? Or would you prefer to have the air traffic
controller Google how to maintain the engine? It's the same thing,
right? They both know about air travel. Ummmm. Not exactly. The logic does not work. It doesn't work with regard to immunization, either.
My last point is that what you are
perceiving as condescension, at least for me, is PURE FRUSTRATION, at
being accused of nothing short of malfeasance by anti-vax proponents.
I spend every single second of every workday, 50 weeks of the year
doing what little I can do to HEAL people and PROTECT them from
diseases that can kill them. When you have seen a dying person
covered head to toe in excruciatingly painful shingles (as I have),
or known a patient chained to a ventilator for life because of
complications of the flu (as I have)—and I could go on and on—you become pretty passionate about making those things stop.
Vaccines help stop them. End. Of. Story. If your chiropractor thinks
he or she can prevent a kid with the measles or whooping cough from
dying, he or she is delusional. (Now don't get hysterical about
chiropractors here. I have one that I love. I think he is the best
person around to help me in his area of expertise—adjusting my
spine and other parts of my skeleton.)
So you, and many people, don't like the
idea that you should just take our word for it that vaccines are the
way to go. I get it. I really do. But, we take “the expert's”
word for a million things every day. That's why you wear your
government-mandated seat belt every time you get in a car, despite
the risk of injury FROM the seat belt. Some expert taught us that
the risk of injury from the seat belt is lower than the risk of
having your face removed as you crash through the wind shield in a
car accident. If you are not a dumbass, you don't get online to see
what some actor has to say about whether everybody is lying to you
about seat belts. You don't waste time reading everything there is
to read about the government's conspiracy to strangle us all with
seat belts. You get in the car, put the damn thing on, and drive to
work.
