Following reemerging outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States, a local pediatric expert is imploring skeptics of inoculation to trust their healthcare providers. Richard Lampe, pediatric infectious disease specialist at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, spoke about the history and dangers of the concerns.
The link between vaccinations and autism was first proposed in a study conducted by Andrew Wakefield, a former researcher and gastroenterologist who was removed from the United Kingdom’s medical register for misconduct concerning his erroneous findings.
The 1998 CDC recommended vaccination schedule from birth to 14-16 years of age.
“[Wakefield’s] claims against vaccinations like the MMR vaccine have been called the most dangerous medical misinformation of the last 100 years, and for good reason,” Lampe said. “The group of people who are on the fence about immunizing their children are not homogenous and tend to receive their medical information from a variety of sources, some of which are not always credible.”
An investigation by the British Medical Journal in January 2011 contested Wakefield’s findings, causing the study to be retracted from publication, according to CNN. Most of the Wakefield’s co-authors withdrew their names from the study before it was published. After it was revealed that Wakefield had received more than $674,000 from a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers his medical license was revoked by the British government in May 2010.
Congregation members of Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, were involved in an outbreak of measles in September 2013, NPR reported. The majority of the 21 people in the community who contracted the disease had not been immunized. In May 2017, another outbreak of measles occurred among the Somali-American community in Minnesota, afflicting 48 people, according to CNN. Despite the theological disconnect between these two communities, their overlying concerns with vaccinations were nearly identical.
Terri Copeland Pearsons, leader of the Eagle Mountain convent, is the daughter of Kenneth Copeland, a televangelist and former evangelical advisor for Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Copeland Pearsons later clarified the ministry’s position on immunizations in a statement released following the outbreak.
“The concerns we have had are primarily with very young children who have family history of autism and with bundling too many immunizations at one time,” she said in the statement.
The 2008 CDC recommended vaccination schedule from birth to 4-6 years.
Similarly, Minnesota’s 2017 measles outbreak among the Somali communities of Hennepin, Ramsey and Crow Wing counties was also at least partially attributed to fears surrounding the links between childhood vaccines and early autism diagnosis, according to NPR. In 2011, the University of Minnesota executed a comprehensive research project that looked at whether there was a higher prevalence of autism in Somali children residing in Minneapolis compared to non-Somali children in Minneapolis. The research included the data of children who were 7 to 9 years old in 2010. The researchers found Somali and white children in Minneapolis to be equally likely to be identified with autism.
Some pediatricians have even gone as far as to create alternate immunization schedules to space out the doses of vaccine, he said. The likelihood of experiencing side effects from an immunization is not increased by receiving multiple doses at once, however.
“By spacing out a patient’s immunization schedule, you’re kind of creating a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist,” Lampe said. “The same can be said of Thimerosal, which is a mercury-based preservative compound that was common in vaccines for decades. Even though there was never any evidence of substantial harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in the vaccines, it was removed as a precaution and hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines since 2001.”
With vaccinations and immunizations having been proven to be incredibly successful, Lampe said the risk the disease poses to an unvaccinated child is unquestionably higher than the risk of a severe reaction from a vaccine, which are exceptionally rare.
The 2018 CDC recommended vaccination schedule from birth to 15 months of age.
In 2014, the United States experienced 667 individual cases of measles spread out amongst 23 separate outbreaks, according to the CDC. Many of the 2014 measles outbreak cases were associated with the Philippines, which experienced a large measles outbreak that year, and occurred predominantly among unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio. 2014 was by far the worst year for measles since the CDC began monitoring outbreaks in 2010.
Since January, there have been 34 people from 11 states (Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas) with reported cases of measles so far in 2018.
Despite the perception that all diseases are slowly being eradicated over time, Smallpox is still the only disease that has been “totally erased” from the planet, according to the CDC. If more people are vaccinated, a disease has fewer opportunities to spread. Comparably, Polio is also close to complete elimination, but still exists in several developing countries.
According to Lampe, the recent outbreaks of measles are noteworthy as the virus was nearly eradicated from the U.S. about a decade ago.
“Today,” he said, “there are many doctors who have never even seen a case of Rubella or measles before. If we eliminated the skepticism surrounding (vaccinations), there is no reason why all vaccine-preventable diseases can’t be eliminated as well.”
About Reece Nations: Undergraduate Managing Editor
