Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Critics say mandatory inoculations may do more harm than good. But what about all the lives that have been saved?
Aug 5, 1999 | "We as a government can no longer keep our heads buried in the sand like an ostrich, pretending there is no problem," said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., the arch-conservative, hatchet-faced chief of the House Government Reform Committee, as he waved a sheath of documents that he said showed thousands of casualties over the past year.
Burton's rather surprising target: mass immunizations. The shots we get with our mother's milk constitute the single most effective medical intervention of the past century -- but in front of a packed hearing Tuesday, Burton described mandatory vaccination as "a good intention gone too far" that "creates an inherent conflict between the interests of the individual and the community." He promised to lead a thorough reexamination of the nation's vaccination program.
Burton's hearing marked the triumph of an Internet-based coalition of vaccination critics who have claimed for years that inoculation does more harm than good. The critics, who range from legitimate scientists to prodigious yarn-spinners, claim the government is obscuring the danger of vaccines and urge the abolition of mandatory vaccinations for schoolchildren.
The movement is swimming against a tide of new vaccines that have entered or are about to enter childhood inoculation schedules. In the past decade, shots to protect against meningitis, hepatitis B and viral diarrhea have been added to the regimen protecting against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, tetanus and diphtheria. Public health officials also hold up vaccination as a key tool against the worrisome threat of drug-resistant bacteria: By priming the body's immune system to fight a particular organism, they argue, vaccines preempt the need for antibiotics to fight the bacteria later, after infection.
But Tuesday's hearing showed that despite these promising developments, the tide could easily turn against vaccines unless public officials convincingly show they are taking pains to keep vaccines safe. And while there are surveillance systems in place -- such as the one that detected problems in the rotavirus vaccine last month -- blunders have the capacity to undermine confidence.
The Pentagon, for one, hasn't helped matters. Since announcing in December 1997 that it would immunize 2.3 million service members against anthrax, it has been forced to use stocks of a relatively crude anthrax vaccine that was licensed in the 1960s and manufactured at a laboratory with quality control problems. Coincidentally or not, many troops receiving the vaccine have reported illness, provoking a culture of resistance within the military -- with scores and perhaps hundreds of experienced reserve pilots and others threatening to quit rather than take a vaccine they think is unsafe.
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