Health Care/Joan Retsinas

A Life Without Vaccines

In the 2004 movie “A Day Without Mexicans,” the economy of California — and, by extension, much of the country — shut down. Immigrants — legal and not — staff our factories, our restaurants, our hospitals, our nursing homes, our construction crews. Rhetoric aside, we shrink that force at our peril.

Let’s turn to vaccinations. How about a year without them? Incensed by “mandates” for COVID vaccines, some myopic libertarians have mounted a new demand: Down with Vaccines. All of them. These objectors have turned their ire on the slew of vaccines once blithely accepted. Some “anti-vaxxers” distrust government; some distrust science; some trust only social media and cable networks.

Let’s visit their Eden: A Life Without Vaccines.

Start with a bucket list of diseases: measles, smallpox, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, yellow fever, typhoid, cervical cancer, chicken pox, hepatitis B, hepatitis A, rubella, HIB, rotavirus, pneumonia, shingles, cholera, dengue fever, ebola.

What do they have in common?

One, all can prove lethal. Not all the time, but the risk is real. Consider measles. It is not a simple rash, but a respiratory disease. Of the children infected, a small percentage  (one to two in 1,000) will die. With whooping cough, one to two of 100 babies will die. Cervical cancer can be treated successfully, but not always. Even shingles is sometimes fatal — one in a thousand patients over age 70 will die from it.

Two, short of death, the diseases can be painful as well as disabling. Back to measles. The sequelae can include ear infections, diarrhea, pneumonia, encephalitis, hearing loss. Chicken pox is not benign for a minority of patients, particularly immunocompromised and older patients. They can suffer from dehydration, bleeding of the brain, sepsis. The world effectively eradicated smallpox, but those survivors had scars. (Queen Elizabeth the First wore heavy white makeup to cover hers.) People who have recovered from shingles remember excruciating pain. Twenty-first century Americans know nobody who has recovered from cholera, dengue fever, ebola, or yellow fever; but in parts of the world you see the ravages.

Three, we have no sure-fire treatments for these diseases, even for measles and chicken pox, the “normal” maladies of generations past. For tetanus, we can only manage the symptoms until the disease ebbs. Antibiotics don’t help with viruses. Before scientists zeroed in on “germ theory,” people trusted to sanitation: cleanliness would insure health. When polio first surged among children in the 1950s, many parents trusted that super hygiene (a stand-in for middle class) would spare their children. It didn’t. In fact, children from crowded households were less likely to get polio. We treat cervical cancer with radiation and chemotherapy, a rigorous regimen.

Third, many of the diseases are contagious.The risk varies with the disease. Some viruses are airborne, like pneumonia and COVID; others depend on sexual contact or blood infusions. With measles, 90% of people in close contact with an infected person will develop measles. Typically the infected person coughs or sneezes; the droplets land on a surface; others touch that surface, then their mouths, eyes or noses. Typhoid is linked to food or water contaminated with sewage from the stools of an infected person; but it can spread also from kisses. And the infected person can be asymptomatic, like Typhoid Mary, the New York City cook who infected her employer’s family. Whooping cough (pertussis bacteria) are spread through droplets from sneezes or coughs. Yellow fever travels from infected mosquito to a person, who infects another mosquito,

Finally, vaccines can safeguard people from the worst effects of these diseases, if not eradicate them. Tetanus is an example: in the 1940s, before a vaccine, the death rate was over 80%. Today we see few cases. Polio is rare. Vaccines have worked against ebola and yellow fever. Yet the “just say no” zealots are convincing a disturbing number of us to reject vaccines. Worldwide, measles cases were trending downward until 2916, but rose 50% to its highest level in decades in 2020. Ditto for chicken pox, whooping cough, diphtheria, mumps. The reason: people stopped getting their children vaccinated. (Some good news: rates for cervical cancer and rubella continue to fall.) The effect of vaccines may wane over time; some people may suffer side effects; but the ultimate risk-calculation points to vaccination as a 21st century miracle.

COVID-19 has joined the list of sometimes-fatal contagious diseases with no sure-fire treatment. Strangely, though, right-wing politicians have made the COVID vaccine a political bete-noire. And, at the same time, a cadre of “anti-vaxxers” are joining forces to plead not just for an injunction on COVID vaccine mandates, but for an end to all vaccines.

Looking forward, it behooves everybody to denounce the “Stop the Vaccines” campaigns as dangerous, to proclaim the fact that you can hate government but still embrace the science of immunology, and finally to line up,  along with your children, for the vaccines. A vaccine-free Eden is an Armageddon.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022

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