Five years ago, in February of 2010, there was a news story that really caught my eye.
"With 1,521 cases, the mumps outbreak is the largest in the U.S. since 2006, when nearly 6,600 cases were reported, mostly in six Midwestern states. Usually fewer than 300 cases are reported annually."
This article vastly understates the situation, though, by saying, "Most had a mumps vaccination." Most did, it said. Really? Most? More than half? What does that mean? I wondered enough to go look it up and I found this info corroborated: "88 percent had been MMR II vaccinated with 75 percent of those receiving at least two doses," the same sources that I found back then are examined in the article I read yesterday at Truthout:
Selective Outrage and Public Health: There Are Greater Dangers Than Anti-Vaxxers
And if people received this MMR, particularly the MMR II from specific years, then whether or not it worked they think they're safe, although they've also had that same vaccine for measles and rubella. Caveat Emptor.
I have been vaccinated and updated many times (a booster while working at a college that had a measles outbreak 30 years ago in 1985 among others) and in 1968 I was one of a trial group of kindergardeners who got to "Fight the Dragon" of Rubella, by offering ourselves up with parental consent to test some of the R in "MMR".
But I was also a medical secretary in 1988 who taped the government-required poster to the wall that gave the number for the National Vaccine Injury program that had to be started because deny it or not, something was not always right. So I had reason to wonder, as I watched both sides duke it out, all the while trying in vain to get a smallpox vaccination for my little child because I really am afraid of that although 'they said it's been eradicated.'
Then when outbreaks happen in which the lede is buried because the real story is that most of the sick individuals did receive all their recommended doses, it makes me wonder about innumeracy in America. That is to say that if three out of four of these sick patients had been fully vaccinated then what good did it do them? And if this is the success rate then what exactly are we doing?
In 2010, in the wake of these serious outbreaks, two whistleblowers, Stephen A. Krahling and Joan A. Wlochowski, both former Merck virologists, brought a lawsuit to bear against Merck. The lawsuit alleges that Merck scientists have consistently and knowingly falsified data on the efficacy of its line of MMR vaccines. Although Merck attempted to have the case dismissed, in September 2014, a federal court in Pennsylvania decided to hear the case.
Innumeracy is just one of the things I worry about. Americans are dangerously unaware of what childhood diseases really look like. For example when I look at that child in the shutterstock photo of 'sick child' I see at a glance that she has chicken pox, not measles or mumps. Yet this photo (with a caption concerning measles) is being slapped onto an article about mumps by an editor who doesn't know/care if that's actually a picture to go with the story. Unfortunately, viewers of this article have no reason to even notice that if they don't already know.
In the face of secrets and lies I think it needs to be acceptable to question mandated healthcare (even as I vigorously believe in a national health system and public health laws!) when there are unknowns that we know of.
The motivations of those who were unvaccinated at Disneyland are currently unknown. Respecting that fact, it may even be too simplistic to paint each person involved as part of a unified "anti-vax movement" at all. For those of us concerned with herd immunity, expending a disproportionate amount of time and energy on anti-vaxxers distracts us from asking other important questions that affect everyone's public health.
But 92 people have acquired measles this time and everyone wants to be Anti-Anti-Vaxxers! instead of giving due consideration to where the other
thousands of people lost their immunity: "due to failed vaccines, bad science, fraud and corruption?"
If the highest priority truly is public health, then it would seem that a far graver threat to that health is bad science being used as a tool to mask the danger of a potentially defective product - in this case Merck's MMR vaccine - pushed into the marketplace at the cost of public safety and tax dollars. At the very least, if the media is outraged at the threat posed by a fringe group of "anti-vaxxers" who represent a vocal though extremely small minority of citizens who have chosen to exercise a legal right to remain unvaccinated, then there must be proportional outrage at a multibillion-dollar corporation that may have been unethically pushing a faulty product onto an unknowing public to increase its profits at the expense of public health.
That's what I think too, so I'm takin' a chance and bringing this Truthout to you.