Measles Update

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have helped spread this dangerous myth.

CDC reports that there are already as many measles cases in 2019 as in all of 2016 and 2017 combined.

Tyler Pager at NYT

Public officials and health experts had given several warnings: Do not allow a student in school if they had not been vaccinated against measles.

Still, during New York City’s largest measles outbreak in a decade, a school in Brooklyn ignored that advice, resulting in one student infecting at least 21 other people with the virus.

The outbreak, at Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov in Williamsburg, is reigniting concerns that too many people in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities are unvaccinated, as well as worries that measles would continue to spread after travelers arrived last fall from parts of Israel and Europe, where the virus was spreading.

City officials said they have struggled to increase vaccination rates in certain communities because of popularity of the widely debunked anti-vaccination movement, with parents declining vaccines for their children in fear that they increase the risk of autism.

Michael Gerson at WP:

Politics does make a huge difference to public health in one way. When politicians give legitimacy to dangerous and disproven scientific theories — as both Paul and President Trump have done on vaccinations — they are encouraging a lower level of coverage, which makes a higher level of compulsion necessary. So it is the vaccination skeptics who are making intrusive public health methods more likely. That just makes sense, when you just think about it for a second.

Gottlieb to Step Down

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

 Laurie McGinley , Lenny Bernstein and Josh Dawsey report at WP:

Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who used his post to tackle difficult public health issues from youth vaping to opioid addiction – surprising early skeptics worried about his drug industry ties – resigned Tuesday, effective in about a month.

Gottlieb, who has been commuting weekly to Washington from his home in Connecticut, said he wants to spend more time with his family. The 46-year-old physician, millionaire and cancer survivor known for a self-assured, sometimes brash, manner lives in Westport, with his wife and three daughters – 9-year-old twins and a 5-year-old.

Too bad.  He was strong on vaccines.  On February 14 Eileen Drage O'Reilly reported at Axios:

The federal government may try to take action if states don't tighten their vaccine exemption laws and measles continues to spread in sections of the U.S., FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb tells Axios.

Driving the news: Overall case numbers of measles remain low in the U.S. but the disease is growing in areas of high non-vaccination rates. Some states like Washington are considering tightening their exemptions even as they continue to face a more organized anti-vaccination movement.

"It's an avoidable tragedy," Gottlieb, who says he's usually a proponent of state rights, tells Axios. "Too many states have lax laws."

Autism and Presidential Politics

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in campaigns.

The Chicago Tribune editorializes:

Which candidate for president made the following statement about childhood inoculations? "We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines."

Or this one? "It's indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates that it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines."

If you answered Donald Trump, nice try, but wrong. The first one was made by Barack Obama when he ran in 2008. The second came from his opponent, John McCain.

While running for president in 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., raised similar doubts about the HPV vaccine, recalling a woman who approached her after a debate. "She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine," Bachmann said.

Maybe it's time for political parties to require a science course for anyone who wants their nomination. Misinformation about vaccines has become a stubborn, recurring feature of presidential campaigns.

Dr. Marc Siegel writes at Slate that Ben Carson and Rand Paul mildly disagreed with Trump:

Unfortunately, Carson went on to promote another fear-driven myth about vaccines. He added that “we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time.” There is not a shred of scientific evidence to back this up. Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist and another candidate on the stage, echoed his fellow doctor’s concerns about bunching vaccines.

Both of these physicians have had great accomplishments in the medical world, Carson as a pioneer neurosurgeon and Paul as a successful eye surgeon. As a fellow physician it was unsettling to me to see them speculating wildly outside their areas of expertise, especially in the wake of Trump’s dangerous comments. They should have known better.

Scientists continually reassess whether a contagious disease is enough of a threat to prompt a national vaccination campaign. Vaccines and the way they are scheduled and bunched are rigorously tested for safety and efficacy. In fact, immunizations are some of the most-tested medical interventions in use today.

There is also simply no evidence that too many vaccines over-stimulate the immune system, a common fear among parents. In fact, young children encounter thousands of far more powerful immune-stimulating microbes in between vaccinations than during them.

Autism in the GOP Debate

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.

Steve Sternberg writes at US News & World Report:

Three Republican candidates' assertions about childhood vaccines offered a revealing – and deeply dismaying – glimpse of how they'd perform in the White House, leading vaccine experts said Thursday after the second presidential debate.

"What you hear is so badly reasoned, so poorly thought out – it makes you wonder: 'Is that how they'll manage foreign policy?'" says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The discussion began Wednesday night when debate moderator Jake Tapper of CNN asked candidate Ben Carson, a former pediatric neurosurgeon, whether he believed real estate mogul Donald Trump should stop making statements linking vaccines to autism.

The question touched off a rambling exchange involving Carson, Trump and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, also a doctor. It not only resurrected the vaccine-autism theme, but also raised concerns about whether some vaccines are more important than others and about the spacing of the vaccines offered to children before they reach adolescence.

Trump has repeatedly declared vaccines safe while – often in the same breath – raising the specter of autism, an association that emerged in a flawed, and since retracted, 1998 research study. The connection has since been disproved in dozens of scientific studies. For instance, an analysis of 67 research studies released last year in the journal Pediatrics found strong evidence that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine – impugned by the debunked 1998 study – does not cause autism in children and showed that vaccine-related side effects are rare.

Nevertheless, in remarks during the debate, Trump offered an account of an unnamed "child, a beautiful child" who "went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, [and] now is autistic."

He used the same language three years ago:

"It happened to somebody that worked for me recently. I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world. And all of a sudden, they go in, they get this monster shot. You ever see the size of it? It's like they're pumping in—you know, it's terrible, the amount. And they pump this into this little body. And then all of the sudden, the child is different a month later. And I strongly believe that's it

Pols and Vaccines

The New York Times reports:

Gov. Chris Christie’s trade mission to London was suddenly overshadowed on Monday after he was quoted as saying that parents “need to have some measure of choice” about vaccinating their children against measles. The New Jersey governor, who is trying to establish his credibility among conservatives as he weighs a run for the Republican nomination in 2016, later tried to temper his response. His office released a statement clarifying that “with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”

 Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a physician, was less equivocal, telling the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday that parents should absolutely have a say in whether to vaccinate their children for measles.

“While I think it’s a good idea to take the vaccine, I think that’s a personal decision for individuals,” he said, recalling his irritation at doctors who tried to press him to vaccinate his own children. He eventually did, he said, but spaced out the vaccinations over a period of time.

... 

Asked about immunizations again later on Monday, Mr. Paul was even more insistent, saying it was a question of “freedom.” He grew irritated with a CNBC host who pressed him and snapped: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.”

Nia-Malika Henderson reports at The Washington Post:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) both said Monday that they favor "choice" when it comes to whether parents get their kids vaccinated. This was seen by the Democratic National Committee as "kowtowing to the fringe rhetoric of the anti-vaccination movement."

"Chris Christie isn't a scientist. He isn't a doctor. And he sure as heck isn't a leader," DNC spokesman Mo Elleithee said. "If his campaign is going to be about kissing up to the radical, conspiracy theory base that’s wagging the dog of today’s Republican Party, that’s up to him and his cracker-jack team."

Here are some Democratic figures who might want to have a word with the DNC:

• Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
• Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Andrew Kaczynski reports at Buzzfeed:

For more than two decades, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was a member of a group, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, that advocated a link between vaccinations and autism, among other conspiracy theories.

The AAPS, as Kentucky’s Courier-Journal noted in a 2010 article on Paul’s association with it, opposes mandatory vaccinations and promoted discredited studies, which linked the vaccine-component thimerosal to autism in children.

“Mandatory vaccines violate the medical ethic of informed consent. A case could also be made that mandates for vaccines by school districts and legislatures is the de facto practice of medicine without a license,” the group said in a fact-check.

Paul’s adviser, Doug Stafford, told BuzzFeed News he didn’t know if Paul was still a member of the group but that he joined because it was a group of pro-life doctors. He said Paul does not endorse all the group’s views.

Jane Orient, who handles media for AAPS, said she did not believe Paul had renewed his membership.

Rand Paul and Autism

Previous posts discussed Sam Wessels, an Iowa kid with ASD who poses questions to presidential candidates.

At The Des Moines Register, Jennifer Jacobs reports on a Rand Paul town hall in Sioux City, Iowa:

A 12-year-old boy named Sam Wessels tried to pin Paul down on government aid for those with autism, like himself.

Wessels said he had been speaking to politicians since he was 5, starting with Sen. John McCain, "including your father, great guy by the way, and the current president twice. And they all promised to help me, but after seven years, little if anything has changed. Can you be the one we can really count on?"

Paul answered: "I'm going to give you an answer you probably have never gotten before. ... Here's the real answer. Government's never going to find — and I'm not saying government can't help, I support some government help for autism — but the answer's going to come from scientists. And politicians get in the way of most answers."

But where do the scientists get the money for autism research?  According to IACC, most comes from the federal government: 




Here the exchange between Wessels and Ron Paul: