Currently, we are witnessing the return of a variety of preventable diseases due to vaccination. Within the past few weeks, Washington state declared a state of emergency due to a measles outbreak. Recently, news just broke of a 2017 case where a 6 year-old’s parents in Oregon refused to give their child the tetanus vaccine, so he spent 57 days in the hospital with $800,000 in medical bills. When these diseases are preventable, why are they occurring so frequently?
The rise in preventable diseases like measles is due to the rise of the anti-vaccination movement. As more people become hesitant about vaccines and do not vaccinate their children, the community’s immunity to the disease decreases and people are more likely to contract it. Many critics of the anti-vaccination movement have blamed the associated spread of misinformation on social media, particularly Facebook.
Simply searching “vaccine” on Facebook provides one with a multitude of anti-vaccination groups, many of which outright ban posts that support medicine, pharmaceuticals, or vaccination in anyway. These groups are found on the first page, making this misinformation readily accessible and allowing users to easily curate a bubble of those who support them. Facebook has since announced plans to diminish the visibility of these groups, sparking arguments on freedom of speech. Pinterest has supported their own suppression of anti-vaccination communities by saying that users have “the freedom of speech, not the freedom of reach”.
This spread of misinformation is based in fear. A lot of vaccine hesitancy is, unfortunately, sensibly based on distrust of the government and pharmaceuticals. Within the past few years alone, we constantly see stories about the harms pharmaceutical companies have enacted on the population, often with some farm of government knowledge or complacency:
- Purdue Pharma was accused of simultaneously urging doctors to state an opioid had a low addiction risk and manufacturing an anti-addiction drug–helping to create the opioid epidemic to increase profits.
- Insulin prices have increased to cost patients hundreds of dollars a month. This is a necessary drug for diabetics, and patients have attempted to ration their supplies and have thus died.
- This is combined with high-deductible insurance plans that cost Americans hundreds of thousands every year. Many plans also have a “donut-hole” where after a certain threshold, insurance won’t cover anything until the next threshold has been met.
Among other things, these make it painfully obvious that the American healthcare system is not meant to help patients. We are customers and consumers, and thus can be cast aside in the interest of higher profits. As many of the anti-vaccination movement have argued, companies must be more forthcoming with the risks associated with medications and re-introduce the foundations of informed consent and bodily autonomy in healthcare. However, these things cannot be instituted in a way that places public health at risk.
Let's Get Political with Science 
The thing I hear a lot from people who are against vaccinating their children is that doctors and nurses get very little education about how vaccines work, so how could they know? And this is a problem. Doctors and nurses who have comparatively little background will struggle to answer follow-up questions about the dangers of vaccinations to patients and parents alike. But there’s also a different between taking courses in medical school about vaccinations and knowing how to read scientific literature with a fairly complex understanding of statistics. It’s the researchers and statisticians, not the doctors, that I trust most when it comes to weighing the pros and cons of vaccinations. And I say this as someone who works with family practice doctors everyday–though some of them can also just talk and talk about how vaccines work, regardless of how much they actually learned about it in school.
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That’s absolutely a fair point. Most in the medical field are taught the mechanism through which vaccinations work, and that’s what they know. It should be a requirement that medical professionals are kept up-to-date on all research, and the best of them are. But it’s an impossible standard to ask anyone to read every single clinical study on every single drug from every manufacturer, and that’s included for vaccines. One thing that I have seen are easier-to-read pamphlets that are provided by the manufacturers that include information on side effects, that are provided to patients when they receive vaccinations. Greater transparency and communication in medicine, as well as any scientific discipline, is a great thing.
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