2: Vaccines Don't Work

To mainstream medicine, vaccination is one of the most unqualified success stories ever, hands down. But to opponents of vaccination, it's just a scare story to allow children to become profit pincushions for big pharma. (A brief comparison of the cost-benefit analyses of alternative health treatments and one-dose oral vaccinations should be enough to put this one to bed, but we're dealing with argument here, not motive.) How do they figure that?

First, they have some facts on their side. Mortality from infectious diseases did begin to decline in developed countries before the introduction of mass vaccination campaigns. Slum clearance programs, rising affluence (as opposed to the rising effluence that plagued Dr Snow's patients) and better food and housing, together with improved sanitation practices, brought a sharp decline in the diseases of overcrowded cities. And better immune systems ensured that those who did become ill didn't die so often, making the mortality — as opposed to the morbidity — statistics tell one story: in the headline of anti-vaxxxer blog childhealthsafety, "Vaccines Did Not Save Us." 

To take a set of results at random, let's look at diphtheria. Diptheria used to be a common childhood disease which caused Sore throat and cough, often leading to inflammation of the throat and sometimes clotting problems, as well as the throat swelling up and preventing the patient from breathing. In the UK, diphtheria vaccines didn't really reach us til 1940. But UK diphtheria rates fell hard from the 1920s onward, according to a graph drawn by childhealthsafety from another anti-vaxxx author's book on the subject.

And according to the website childhealtsafety, the British Journal of Nursing reported in 1948 that "about 36 percent of the children had been immunized but only about 19 percent of the younger ones." I was unable to verify this source because the link leads to a 404, and a Google search didn't produce anything either. Assuming for a moment that the facts are on the nail, though, it's always possible that diphtheria rates fell because of homebuilding programs and improving nutrition. That is what we'd expect to find. Slum clearance programs that began after WW1 also resulted in people living much further apart, so that infections weren't so easy to spread; we still don't need to invoke pestilential odors or toxic lifestyles to explain that one.

Smallpox.

We don't think about smallpox very often, for one very good reason: vaccination has exterminated it. 

There are only two places on earth smallpox still exists: a lab in the former USSR and a lab in the USA's CDC. Otherwise, thanks to an aggressive program of vaccination across the entire world, it has been utterly destroyed. 

We met smallpox in passing in the "germ theory" section. Edward Jenner found that cowpox, a relatively mild illness, made you immune to smallpox. So he started deliberately infecting people with cowpox. His method was disgusting - he cut his patients with a scalpel and rubbed infected pus into the wound. But it worked: when he cut the same patients with a scalpel and rubbed pus from smallpox patients into the wound, they didn't get sick. That's not an airy-fairy theory based on blobs down an electron microscope that could be anything, to the untrained eye at least: that's a disease with a 40 percent mortality rate being prevented with a dirty knife. You can't have "toxic lifestyles," noxious odors or lack of exercise: these were robust country people, mostly agricultural laborers and milkmaids. So it wasn't that they weren't exposed to enough good, honest dirt either. The problem was germs. The solution was vaccination.

If smallpox seems too long ago, too far away, how about polio? Smallpox wasn't an American problem in the 20th century, by and large, but polio? That's what put FDR in a wheelchair. That's what terrified American parents all summer, every summer, because no-one could figure out what caused it. Swimming? Everyone stopped swimming, but they still got polio. Maybe it was something in the air? Or something people ate? Preventative measures and treatments included:

"giving oxygen through the lower extremities, by positive electricity. Frequent baths using almond meal, or oxidizing the water. Applications of poultices of Roman chamomile, slippery elm, arnica, mustard, cantharis, amygdalae dulcis oil, and of special merit, spikenard oil and Xanthoxolinum. Internally use caffeine, Fl Kola, dry muriate of quinnine, elixir of cinchone, radium water, chloride of gold, liquor calcis and wine of pepsin."

It was a little early for reiki and acupuncture, and a little late for bleeding, but they gave everything else the old college try. Result? People still got polio, still got paralyzed, and still wound up in iron lungs. Parents still watched their children in terror or locked them indoors for whole summers, fearing the first fever-like symptoms that led in just hours to permanent paralysis.

What saved us?

Vaccines. Now, nobody gets polio. Because polio is caused by a virus, and we're all vaccinated. 

READ Rare Polio-Like Virus Strikes California

Nobody in the West, anyway. Now there's a single-dose, oral polio vaccine, we've almost exterminated the disease across Africa and Asia too. There are only a couple of places where you can still find people with Polio: Afghanistan is one. The Taliban officially fears the US government is using polio vaccination teams to carry out espionage, but on the ground, Taliban fighters and officials warn village mothers that the vaccine will make their children infertile or kill them. Pakistan is another. One Pakistani Taliban cleric used his radio show to warn mothers that anti-polio workers were "part of a conspiracy of Jews and Christians to make Muslims impotent and stunt the growth of Muslims". American Anti-Vaxxxers eschew conspiracies of Jews and Christians (for the most part) and prefer to point the finger at the New World Order, the Bavarian Illuminati and other baroque edifices of inventive self-deception which, usually at least, don't smack so much of antisemitism.