Galveston Daily News
(Galveston, TX)
March 20, 2011
Author spotlights vaccine safety
By Mark Lardas
Correspondent
“Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All,” by Paul A. Offit, Basic Books, 270 pages, $27.50.
A man took his infant son in for a vaccination. That night, the child died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Could the shot have caused his son’s death?
In this case, it did not. When the man got to the doctor’s office, the line was too long. He took his son home without getting vaccinated, intending to return the next day. But suppose he had waited? Forever after he would have wondered if maybe — just maybe — that shot had been responsible.
“Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All,” by Paul A. Offit, uses this story to illustrate the difficulties of assigning responsibility for problems caused by, or assumed to have been caused by, vaccines.
He shows how those uncertainties have been exploited by those opposing vaccination to fan fear.
Offit also presents the real danger that fears of imaginary perils can cause — including death — from diseases prevented by vaccination.
Offit shows how the modern anti-vaccine movement started after a British study suggested a link between the whooping cough vaccine and brain damage in infants.
The study led to a TV special in America highlighting children who had suffered seizures after receiving the vaccine.
The results of the study could not be repeated in other studies and eventually were repudiated. The true cause of the seizures went undiscovered for more than a decade after the original study was released. It was unrelated to the vaccine.
By then, the damage was done, as Offit documents. A cottage industry had sprung up suing vaccine manufacturers, almost driving vaccines off the market.
Other studies — occasionally fueled by doctors in the pay of plaintiff lawyers — claimed ill results for other vaccines.
Many parents stopped vaccinating their children. Children died from preventable diseases.
Offit does not reflexively oppose vaccine opponents. One of his heroes in “Deadly Choices” is John Samalone, a layman who led a successful movement to replace the live polio vaccine with the safer Salk vaccine.
But Samalone was trying to improve vaccine safety, not eliminate vaccines. Offit targets those who prey on the credulous using flawed science to fan fears of vaccines.
He also provides a history of the anti-vaccine movement from the 18th century to the present. Offit shows the many parallels that tactics and arguments used by modern vaccine opponents have with these early efforts.
“Deadly Choices” is a book that should be read by any parent worried about vaccine safety.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City.