Vaccines have changed our world - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
How do you judge United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy? Is he a brave man willing to stand up for what he believes, no matter how unpopular that is, or is he an egotist, sure he knows more than doctors and medical experts in his campaign against vaccines?
Earlier this year Kennedy, a non-doctor, already ousted two deputies and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As this is written, he is reported to be at loggerheads with Marty Makary, head of the Food and Drug Administration, but is hesitant to fire him, apparently, because of the upset the earlier dismissals caused.
I grew up at a time when we witnessed the miracles that vaccines, which Kennedy opposes, could bring. Many Kennedy supporters are younger. They haven’t witnessed the changes vaccines brought and, instead, fear the ramifications.
Recently there have been stories about the outbreak of influenza and the death of three children near Ottawa as a result. Doctors are warning parents to get their children vaccinated. Seniors, like me, are also vulnerable. I recently lined up for the flu vaccine and the latest version of the COVID-19 vaccine.
A few months ago we had a measles outbreak among Mennonite settlements in New Brunswick, Ontario and Alberta, all infected by one woman who lived in Thailand but travelled to New Brunswick for a wedding, thereby spreading the infection to every other unvaccinated wedding guest who spread it to Ontario, Alberta and to Texas. Canada had over 5,000 cases from that one infected woman. Mennonites generally have low rates of vaccination.
In general, perhaps influenced by Kennedy’s skepticism, vaccination rates have been dropping. Commenting on the measles outbreak, Globe and Mail columnist Dr. Andre Picard said only 92 per cent of Canadians have had one dose of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella - rubella was formerly known as German measles or three-day measles) vaccine and just 79 per cent have had two doses of the MMR - well below the threshold needed for herd immunity, which is 95 per cent.
I had measles when I was a child, well before the vaccine was available, and survived, though I was kept in bed and my eyes sheltered against bright light to protect me. My mother was particularly concerned because she had lost my older brother, born before World War II, to the disease.
Other diseases have also been conquered because of discovery of the vaccines. My childhood doctor, William Victor Johnston, in his book Before the Age of Miracles, published in the early 1970s, discussed the toll. In 1920, when he started practising, there were 113.1 deaths per 100,000 population from whooping cough. By 1960, that had dropped to 5.9. Measles dropped from 8.8 per 100,000 in 1920 to 0.2 in 1960.
The scourge my generation saw when I was little was polio, which varied from year to year. In 1953, there were 2,109 cases of polio, but with vaccinations there were none in 1963, with a random two cases in 1964 and 1969.
Polio was a truly frightening disease. I remember the 2017 based-on-fact film Breathe where Robin Cavendish became paralyzed from the neck down by polio at the age of 28. He is placed on a respirator and given only three months to live. But his wife sees better possibilities. She buys a house and a friend, Teddy Hall, develops a chair to let him escape being bedridden. Later, Hall develops a modified van that lets Cavendish be mobile.
That’s a long introduction to one particular scene from the movie. At one point, Cavendish is going to speak to a convention in Germany but he first visits a state-of-the-art clinic where polio victims are housed in iron lungs to help them breathe, but its appears like a file cabinet with iron lungs stacked on top of, and beside, other iron lungs, each housing a polio victim who is being kept alive, but you can’t figure out if simply being alive is worth the effort.
Mine was the first generation to be freed from many of these diseases. I remember going from school to the local health nurse to get vaccinated for different diseases.
People younger than me never saw the miracle that vaccines brought - the many lives were saved or improved because of those vaccines.
And so the message of Robert F. Kennedy about the possible dangers of vaccines lacks the balance of knowing the horrible world of disease that vaccines have prevented.
The world is a different, better place for the lack of diseases like whooping cough, measles and polio, all of which are reduced because of vaccinations. How do we get that message through to the unvaccinated today? Robert F. Kennedy promotes a frightening world!