http://www.startelegram.com/opinions/guestcol.htm
April 5, 2001
By Dawn Richardson
Special to the Star-Telegram
It is time to stop dumbing down the vaccine safety debate
by calling parents concerned with vaccine reactions and parental rights “anti-vaccine.”
An Op-Ed column on Monday by Russell Tolman and Dr. Mark Shelton oversimplified
and misrepresented a serious issue.
Parents love their children and want to protect them, but
vaccines, like the diseases they are designed to prevent, carry an
unpredictable risk of injury or death.
Texas parents want the Texas Legislature to pass proposed
legislation to give them the same freedom that parents already have in Arizona,
California, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico,
North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Washington
to make their own informed, voluntary vaccination decisions without being
subjected to government sanctions.
All diseases and vaccines are not the same, and neither
are all children.
Yet current Texas mandatory vaccination laws, which treat
chickenpox like smallpox and hepatitis B like polio, don’t contain a parental
rights exemption provision. More than 200 new vaccines, which are being
developed for everything from cocaine addiction to sexually transmitted
diseases including AIDS, will be candidates for future mandates.
Some children are at greater biological risk than others
for reacting to vaccines. Texas’ one-size-fits-all mass vaccination policies
don’t take these differences into account, and they fail to minimize the risk
of vaccine-induced injury and death for too many children.
Annually, 12,000 to 14,000 reports of hospitalizations,
injuries and deaths following vaccinations are made to the federal Vaccine
Adverse Event Reporting System, and yet about 90 percent of doctors fail to
report these reactions.
A study published in the February issue of ‘Pediatrics’
revealed that 40 percent of doctors admit to not even mentioning vaccine risks
to their patients.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid
out more than $1.2 billion in damages and yet still turns away three out of
four vaccine victims to cope on their own. Meanwhile, because of a complex
network of state and federal laws, doctors and the vaccine manufacturers
continue to profit while taking no financial responsibility for vaccine
injuries and deaths.
Some parents are trying to save their children from
doctors who are unwilling to acknowledge past vaccine reactions with a medical
exemption and are willing to literally vaccinate a child to death. A
statutorily guaranteed conscientious exemption provision, like the one being
considered by the Texas Legislature, is the only hope that these parents have.
Public health involves more than Tolman and Shelton’s
myopic fixation on high vaccination rates and low infectious-disease rates.
The rate of chronic disease and disability in children is
at an all-time high. Texas children get as many as 39 doses of 12 different
vaccines by school entry—while the brain and immune system are developing at
the most rapid rate. There is growing evidence and a groundswell of scientists,
doctors and parents who believe that overzealous vaccination policies have contributed
to the dramatic increases in asthma, allergies, learning disabilities, autism,
attention-deficit disorder, diabetes and other chronic neuroimmune illnesses.
Recent congressional hearings have raised eye-opening
questions about inadequate vaccine licensing and safety standards; conflicts of
interest involving drug companies and vaccine policy-makers; and huge gaps in scientific
knowledge about how vaccines affect the body.
Based on the epidemic of doctors and public health
officials who mislead parents by exaggerating the risks of the diseases and the
benefits of the vaccine while minimizing and often denying the risks of the
vaccine, it is becoming clear why a growing number of educated parents are
pushing during this legislative session to reclaim their rights over what
vaccines their children will receive and when they will receive them.
Vaccination is a medical procedure that carries an
inherent risk of injury or death, and it is time to let our legislators know
that every Texas parent deserves to be given truthful, unbiased information
about diseases and vaccines and be allowed to make informed, voluntary,
vaccination decisions for their children.
Dawn Richardson is president and co-founder of Parents
Requesting Open Vaccine Education (PROVE). The group’s Web site is www.vaccineinfo.net.
4/02/01
Immunization gains are too valuable to be eroded
By Russell K. Tolman and Mark Shelton
Special to the Star-Telegram
Immunization is considered by the vast majority of medical
professionals and scientific experts to be among the 20th century’s
greatest triumphs. It is by far the most successful and cost-effective public
health tool for preventing disease, disability and death.
Yet despite (or perhaps because of) this success, the
status of immunization is in serious jeopardy in Texas. In spite of the
scientific evidence that immunizations safely provide protection against some of
the most dreaded diseases known, there has been a dramatic increase in the
visibility of organizations opposed to the routine immunization of children.
These organizations have lobbied state governments,
including the Texas Legislature, to pass legislation that would let parents
more easily exempt their children from the vaccinations required for entry into
public school.
Most of us, unlike the anti-vaccine groups, are unwilling
to forget the tragic past. Before vaccines, measles infected millions, killing
hundreds and leaving thousands with serious brain damage and ruined lives.
Diphtheria was one of the most common causes of death in school-aged children,
and polio paralyzed 10,000 to 25,000 children and adults yearly.
Most of us are unwilling to forget summers when families
deserted playgrounds, movie theaters and swimming pools because of the polio epidemic.
We remember when hospitals were filled with iron lungs. The lucky children left
there with braces, on crutches and in wheelchairs. The unlucky ones left in
coffins.
Immunization is one of the most important ways that
parents can protect children against serious diseases. It is also one of the
safest ways, thanks to advancements in medical research and ongoing review by
doctors, researchers and public health officials.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration takes vaccine safety
very seriously. The approval process
for a new vaccine is very strict and can take more than 10 years.
Children are far more likely to be harmed by serious
infectious diseases than by immunizations. An infectious disease is highly
contagious and spreads easily by a touch or by inhaling germs from someone’s
cough or sneeze. Immunizing children is the only protection from many dangerous
infections.
Furthermore, immunization protects all of us. Vaccines
protect not only the person who receives them but also the most vulnerable
members of society: the very young, the old and the chronically ill.
The level of protection now established in our children
and our communities depends on what immunologists refer to as herd immunity.
Modern vaccines are 90 to 95 percent effective, but in practice, this means
that for every 20 children vaccinated, one or two may not be protected from the
virus. If sufficient numbers of children are immunized, the vaccinated ones
protect the unprotected by stopping the chain of transmission. This drastically
lowers the probability that the susceptible child will encounter the disease.
People who choose not to immunize, however, increase the
chances that others in society will get the disease.
Texas currently has a fair law on immunizations that
allows exemptions based on medical conditions certified by a physician and on
religious beliefs. However, bills have
been introduced this session that would make it much easier for parents to
exempt their children from all or specific immunizations. We do not believe
that these bills are good public policy for our children, our communities or
our state.
For the sake of our children, we must not forget the past
or let the unenlightened anti-vaccine minority lull us into complacency.
Immunizations are safe and, more importantly, they work. We must let our
legislators know that we want Texas children immunized—all of them.
Russell K. Tolman is president and CEO of Cook Children’s
Health Care System of Fort Worth. Dr. Mark M. Shelton is a board-certified
pediatric infectious disease specialist.
Dawn Richardson
PROVE(Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education)
P.O. Box 1071
Cedar Park, TX
78630-1071
(512) 918-8760
prove@vaccineinfo.net (email)
http://vaccineinfo.net (web site)
PROVE provides information on
vaccines, and immunization policies and practices that affect the children and
adults of Texas. Our mission is to
prevent vaccine injury and death and to promote and protect the right of every
person to make informed independent vaccination decisions for themselves and
their family.
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This information is not to be construed as medical OR
legal advice.
ALL
INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR
GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE
KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED
AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE. THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO
VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU
ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.