Over 102 Americans have been infected with measles while they were at Disneyland. Disneyland. Could there possibly be anyplace safer in America, or at least, we think were safer, then Disneyland? One would figure that this would be an easy, no-brainer, nonpartisan issue. The measles are bad. Not getting measles are good. We should all be on the side of not getting an infectious disease that used to kill over 500 Americans per year and leave countless Americans with a rare but debilitating disease – acute encephalitis, which can lead to permanent brain damage.
Unfortunately, we, Americans, love a good conspiracy theory. There is nothing better than a disease that we know very little about (the average American can probably tell us that measles causes a rash and that's about it) and you mix that with forced immunizations and the possibility of autism – this then becomes a soup for confusion, chaos and stupidity.
Briefly, because there's no reason for us to belabor the obvious, a paper was published in the prestigious journal Lancet which suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. This paper was published in 1998. Like Freddy Krueger, this paper never dies. Almost immediately papers came out refuting the claim that there were some association between the MMR vaccine and autism. A paper published in 1999 (Lancet) looked at almost 500 patients with autism. The authors look to see if there was a sudden jump in autism cases related to mandatory vaccines. They found no such correlation. The authors looked at the time of the vaccine and onset of symptoms and found no correlation. Another study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 looked at 500,000 children in Denmark. 82% of the children did receive the vaccine. Therefore, they had a large group of kids who received the vaccine and a large group of children who did not receive the vaccine. They found no correlation between autism and the vaccine. So, by 2002, we had really, really good evidence that there was NO correlation between autism and the MMR vaccine. There were several other studies - here, here, here and here which all showed no correlation but Freddie won't die.
One of the reasons that Freddy Krueger won't die and we continue to hear this correlation between autism and the MMR vaccine is that irresponsible politicians want to get their face on television. They simply want more press. Almost none of the politicians they go on television and ever mention that the original article that was published in Lancet has been redacted by the publication. This almost never happens. Most medical publications will stick by their story no matter what. It turned out that the lead author had accepted over $650,000 from a company that stood to gain if the MMR vaccine had been removed from general use.
I'm sorry I have no sympathy for Chris Christie, Rand Paul or even Jenny McCarthy who all decided to jump on the bandwagon. Chris Christie simply proved that he was a hypocrite since he decided to quarantine the nurse that had been to Africa treating Ebola patients but had no evidence of the disease herself but had the nerve to suggest that parents could opt out of mandatory vaccines. Rand Paul, who supposed to be a doctor, a physician, like me, suggested that parents should also be able to opt out of mandatory vaccines. The only way that mandatory vaccines work is if everybody gets them. (I won't even get into some of the nonsense that Ben Carson has been spewing lately. I have personally met this man. He was a brilliant doctor. He is clearly not a brilliant politician. It is really depressing.)
I really, really wish that this stupidity would go away. I know that we have a long tradition of politicians saying mind-numbing garbage. In this day and age, we have more real data at our fingertips than ever before. Can someone make the stupidity go away?