Dr. Bailey on Vaccinations

This posting is given in response to one Nadine posted here.
Dr. Travis Bailey has a background in virology and immunology (M.S.) and genetic embryological development (Ph.D.).

I figured I'd but in my two cents. In a sense I feel like I’m bearing my testimony over a large subject (like why I believe in the Church) with a very superficial overview into my deeper understanding. I put my credentials above so you’ll understand my bias as well as my study and competence and leave it for you to judge for yourself my findings.

My overall testimony is that deciding not to vaccinate in general (rather than knowledge of a specific allergy to specific components of a vaccine) is akin to deciding not to wear a seat belt when in a car because it itches or chafes or you know some people who were thrown safely from their otherwise death trap because they refused to wear one. Chance overwhelmingly favors seat belts as it also does vaccination (if you think you are an exception you merely need to refuse the seat belt). We need to encourage as many people to participate as we do in drinking municipal water or other public works. Brigham Young knew that strong families were supported by strong social initiatives so the early saints together built dams. One could say my children are/family is more important than yours, but Zion would not have bloomed as the rose. I understand love of children (not boys yet as I have none, but girls) and write these things with the consideration that I am their father and they have claim on me for subsistence. I have to stay true to my covenants in order to claim them as my children. As such it would be as if I refused to open my mouth, if I didn’t write what I know so that you can judge my testimony for yourself.

I join my voice to that of the First Presidency who wrote “. . . join other public-spirited citizens in efforts to eradicate ignorance and apathy that have caused the disturbingly low levels of childhood immunization. . . Such efforts are deserving of our full support.”


A Pubmed Search for "vaccine-associated disease" turns up 188 articles since 1966 compared with 20,097 or 100 fold as many for vaccine disease prevention. Many of these articles actually disprove (or fail to prove) that a vaccine caused a disease, some are reports of vaccine-associated disease, a risk that is real, even if extremely small. Many “side effects” cannot be attributed to the vaccination, however, because they are not any more prevalent in vaccinated individuals as non-vaccinated persons. This is especially true with reports of increased autism, mental retardation, diabetes, obesity and so on. Many times the health of vaccinated and non-vaccinated persons have been compared and have failed to link either the vaccinations or preservatives (such as ethylmercury compound known as thimerosol) to these chronic diseases.

I agree that vaccines come with risk, but consider the limited short-term investment our generation makes (and children) to be small considering the long-term benefits to our posterity (grandkids, great grandkids, etc.). You don’t have to take my word for it, there are links on the Pubmed searches that branch out forever almost with more an more data to consider. A key success story of a vaccination with risk is the OPV (oral polio vaccine) vaccination.

Polio

History: A 1916 polio epidemic in the United States killed 6,000 people and paralyzed 27,000 more. In the early 1950's there was an increase, despite improved sanitation, to more than 20,000 cases of polio each year. Polio vaccination was begun in 1955. By 1960 the number of cases had dropped to about 3,000, and by 1979 there were only about 10. The success of polio vaccination in the U.S. and other countries sparked a world-wide effort to eliminate polio. Thus, no decrease in the previous decades can be attributed to the decrease in polio. Only after pizza was introduced as a staple of the American diet was the disease finally irradicated.

Today: No wild polio has been reported in the United States for over 20 years. But the disease is still common in some parts of the world. It would only take one case of polio from another country to bring the disease back if we were not protected by vaccine. If the effort to eliminate the disease from the world is successful, no one will need polio vaccine again. Until that happy day, to protect our children, we need to keep them away from places that have polio (no missions or travel to endemic locations such as Korea, and screening at entry ports so that no one infected comes to the US) or have them vaccinated.

Risks: Many vaccinations have the potential of causing the disease. A case study last year noted a child becoming paralyzed in Korea who had received the OPV and they are attempting to find polio virus in the child to show he failed to immunize against it. There are two kinds of polio vaccine: less effective IPV, which is the shot recommended in the United States today, and a more effective formaldehyde-killed, oral polio vaccine (OPV), which is drops that are swallowed. Until recently OPV was recommended for most children in the United States. OPV helped us rid the country of polio, and it is still used in many parts of the world.
Both vaccines give immunity to polio, but OPV is better at keeping the disease from spreading to other people. However, for a few people (about one in 2.4 million or 30 out of the 72,000,000 children in the United States), OPV actually causes polio potentially having all of the complications that someone who contracted it normally would have, but likely having a better chance at full recovery. Currently, in the United States, the injected form of the vaccine is recommended.

Why vaccinate?
My vaccination decision is a five-consideration cost-benefit decision.

1.) It is hard being a kid today; it is better to bear the slight risk of vaccine-related harms (some of which are disproven, but persistent in people’s fears) than the much larger risk of harms from diseases they protect against.

There are few known vaccine-associated diseases (such as auto-antibodies generated by the vaccination) that are not also associated with surviving the disease itself (such as auto-antibodies generated in the disease). The following are symptoms of MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella) with a link to the national library of medicine. Like deciding to belt your child after they have been thrown from the car, once the child has the disease, the time for decision to protect them is past.

Measles Mumps Rubella:

Disease: Seizures (jerking and staring), brain damage, deafness, arthritis, miscarriage or birth defects, and death.
Vaccination: Same problems at a less than 1/1000 the chance plus a NEEDLE (I for one hate needles they make me dizzy and nauseated). Other common side effects from these vaccines are milder forms of symptoms of full-blown disease, and allergic reactions. Yet other very serious conditions, such as coma, are documented in people that have had vaccinations, but as they are found so rarely it is impossible to determine if they are a result of the vaccination. They appear in equivalent numbers in children who are not vaccinated.

The trigger for many of these symptoms are more likely caused by something not evaluated in clinical trials, such as genetics, diet, or environment, but because the shot is traumatic, we tend to remember that and fail to appreciate the real trigger.

Varicella-Zoster gives you Chicken pox as a child and Shingles when adult. Same virus at different times of life. When you get over chicken pox you don’t usually conquer Varicella-Zoster; it hides dormant in your neurons until some trigger stimulates it to give you the adult form of the disease. My sister had this at 8 and again around 22. However if you are vaccinated, both diseases are much less severe (both in pain as well as duration) and there has been a dramatic reduction in hospitalizations since the vaccine was introduced.

Arguments regarding other vaccines run along the same vein.

2.) Vaccination has the potential to eradicate a disease eliminating both the suffering of the disease and the future need for any vaccination to boot. Already the smallpox virus has been cleared from the earth so no more children need be vaccinated with no more virus to infect them. As we are able to effect this with more and more diseases we will make it so our children’s children no longer need the vaccinations that we had.

Many viruses cannot survive without direct infected-person to uninfected-person transmission. Some hop from animals to humans and back (such as the bird flu, a virus that caused disease in 1/5 people in the world and killed somewhere between 1/20 to 1/40). Today >200,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths of children are due to the flu (NEJM 2007. Volume 357:1278-1279.) There is nowhere near that many hospitalizations due to vaccination. Because of the need to have a constant supply of new host persons, quarantines have been a semi effective way to prevent disease transfer. We can use this need for new hosts to get rid of the infections. Because people either die, become immune, or become chronic carriers of infections, we get rid of the disease when we deny them new susceptible people to infect. For example if no HIV-infected person had sexual contact with anyone else and did not give blood, HIV/AIDS would be gone from the earth in 30 years.

If enough people are immune to disease because they have been vaccinated it is next to impossible that an infected person will be able to transmit the disease to a susceptible person. They just won’t meet. Rather than being the boat that the disease hitches a ride on, the immunized people form a force field of protection, a firewall between the disease and the vulnerable.

Measles is a disease that takes about 18 days to run its course and so needs only 20-30 new victims per year in a chain-like progression of infection to remain in the community year round (Medical Virology, White and Fenner, 1994 pg 248). This means about 500,000 people need to be concentrated together or in contact with an infected person to maintain the virus indefinitely. Because of this limitation on the virus it is possible to destroy it from the earth and then no one would need to be vaccinated.

After vaccinations were introduced in the US, the incidence of measles infections dropped so low that health professionals thought that, like polio, the end of the disease in the US was near. However around 1989 outbreaks were found in populations of unvaccinated children, especially those who were in contact with immigrants from parts of the world that had no vaccination program.

Those of us who can have the opportunity to help “the weak among [us] to be made strong." Not everyone can tolerate multiple vaccinations, due to allergic reactions. We who can then become the firewall against disease for those persons. As with second hand smoke, if I stop smoking or put filters in my child’s room, I stop the passing of the harm of cigarettes to him or her. Vaccination keeps us disease free, despite exposure to the pathogen. Then we cannot pass the disease on to other people. If we fail to vaccinate, somebody succumbs to the disease, and then passes it on unwittingly aiding the spread of suffering.

3.) There is a little evidence that vaccinations cause increases in mental or endocrine diseases any more than other potential triggers—but not enough to worry me. Despite congressional testimony that vaccines cause deaths regularly, you might be hard pressed to think of a person you knew who died, became autistic, obese, etc. because of a vaccination rather than TV, chlorinated drinking water, absence of father in the home, automobile exhaust, or a myriad of potential triggers for an underlying condition that have only become prevalent in US society since the 1950s. We don't know the cause, we can only guess it is vaccination due to the correlation of onset and disease. However, there are many other things that also correlate (such as TV, refrigeration, air conditioning, etc.) since their use and prevalence match that of the emergence and increasing prevalence of diseases such as autism, childhood obesity, etc. Most people who are obese do not have an antibody against their own cells, they eat more than their energy need and store the excess. It is misleading and dangerous to assume a causative effect when there is only a correlation between two items.

4.) Just because vaccines don’t work every time doesn’t mean you ought not to use them. We have all heard the stories of someone whose seatbelt failed and was luckily thrown from the jeep and saved from being crushed and/or burned (like Nadine), or the guy who had his bike helmet on but hit his chin (that’s me). We still wear seatbelts and bike helmets because the safety odds favor using them, not doing without. This makes a further argument for everybody being vaccinated because a susceptible person (if their vaccine failed to confer immunity) is less likely to see the disease if everyone else is protected by immunization.

5.) The US government/CDC/Health Services/Doctors/Scientists/Vaccine makers/anyone-I-forgot-to-mention are not in some great conspiracy to poison us with false hope. Vaccine success is not phony! If it were, an HIV vaccine would now be available for sale. But so far, efforts on this front have failed miserably, because the effects the vaccine have to demonstrate in order to be approved are rigorous and vetted by people who care that snake-oil is not sold.

Any blame to MMR or thimerosal (ethylmercury) as if it were methylmercury poisoning holds no water when put to scrutiny. The politics of the decision to eliminate thimerosal from childhood vaccinations other than the flu vaccine seems to be to err on the side of terror stricken parents rather than any evidence of mercury poisoning. The panel that made the decision acknowledged that there was no reason for the ban, but did so anyway. Since there are other, less effective but more expensive methods available for preventing bacterial contamination, I’ll pay more for another’s peace of mind.

6.) Disease is a burden of warfare, and, like Captain Moroni did with making body armor and building dirt walls around cities, we can fortify ourselves against attack/invasion. These lighter burdens of vaccinations build more and fortify our specific immune counterattacks to be able to fight off the infections we might receive. They have limitations and restrictions, and risks. But the fortifications can prevent or decrease the severity of the attack. We can also build upon the relative solid foundation of vaccination by helping our bodies in other ways (eating well and exercising).