In October 2009, Luke Duvall of Atkins was a healthy and athletic 15-year-old. Then one day he had a fever that rose to 104.3 degrees. He was rushed to Arkansas Children’s Hospital where he had to be induced into a coma for 12 days as he fought for his life.
He had contracted the H1N1 virus, a strain of influenza also known as swine flu. At the time, Dr. Jerril Green of Children’s Hospital said, “He did have moments when he was really sick enough and there was concern if he didn’t improve he could die from this disease.”
His story was so unusual that 60 Minutes aired a segment titled “Saving Luke.” Ultimately he left the hospital, 36 pounds lighter, but alive, a future ahead.
As a result of his experience, Luke Duvall has become an advocate for vaccination. His family has joined him, and together they support Families Fighting Flu, a non-profit that works to increase vaccination rates among children.
The flu kills more Americans each year than all other vaccine preventable diseases combined. Ninety percent of the children who died from the flu in the winter of 2012 did not receive a flu shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I suspect Mr. Duvall will have something to say about that,and perhaps more, when he speaks at the Clinton School of Public Service on October 7.
It is a timely and important discussion.
According to the World Health Organization, vaccinations prevent 2.5 million deaths per year from diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, and measles. Vaccines eradicated polio and smallpox. The chickenpox vaccine reduces the severity ofan attack, which in the early 1990s caused an average of 105 deaths each year.
Over the course of the last decade there has been a movement afoot in opposition to vaccinations. One of the nation’s leading advocates has been Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model and actress and now co-host of The View. Her son, Evan, was diagnosed with autism in 2005. In 2007, when she made the diagnosis public, she claimed that vaccines were the cause of his illness. Today, she serves as president of Generation Rescue, an advocacy group whose polemic against vaccines centers on autism.
Through Generation Rescue, Ms. McCarthy has gone to great lengths and expense to appear credible and tough-minded. She often appeared on television to pitch her story-one based exclusively on a study conducted by a British scientist, Andrew Wakefield, in 1998, which claimed a scientific link between vaccines and autism.
Her rhetoric is full of wild-eyed protestations.
For example, during a portion of a 2010 Frontline interview about vaccines, she said, “Delay them. Delay them till age 2. Skip some that you might not need. I think I would have skipped the chickenpox. I had it when I was little. To me, I’m not too worried about Evan dying from chickenpox.
There should be some vaccines that we can go, ‘Hmm, maybe not.’ ” On the broader point of disease prevention, she said, “Obviously, if polio came back with a vengeance, I think the unvaccinated children should get a polio vaccine. But until then, I don’t see the harm in skipping maybe a chickenpox or delaying hepatitis B.”
Good grief.
In 2011, Wakefield’s study was discredited by the British Medical Journal, which later described it as an “elaborate fraud.” His medical license was revoked for “serious professional misconduct.”
Since that time the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the recommended schedule of vaccines in the United States is safe and has done much to lower incidents of devastating illness. In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined, “Parental concerns that their children are receiving too many vaccines in the first two years of life, or too many vaccines at a single doctor visit, are not supported in terms of an increased risk of autism.” An earlier study by the Institute of Medicine reached the same conclusion.
Yet Ms. McCarthy and others continue their crusade.
Kenneth Copeland, a television evangelist and Texas mega-church leader who heard his calling walking alongside the banks of the Arkansas River, has articulated a similar position, and has relied substantially on a belief in the efficacy of faith healing.
“To get a vaccine would have been viewed by me and my friends and my peers as an act of fear-that you doubted God would keep you safe, you doubted God would keep you healthy. We simply didn’t do it,” former church member Amy Arden told the Associated Press in August after an outbreak of measles occurred when a person unknowingly exposed to the illness attended service at the church. Twenty-one people linked to the church became infected; 16 of them had not been vaccinated.
During the 2012 Republican primary, U. S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) suggested that the HPV vaccine, which drastically reduces the likelihood of cervical cancer, caused mental retardation. She was quickly rebuked by the medical community and leaders in her political party.
Several years ago Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published a piece in Salon alleging a link between a preservative used in certain vaccines and autism. It was derided, and Salon deleted it from its archives. This year he gave the keynote address at Generation Rescue’s annual convention.
Recently the CDC reached a critical conclusion that philosophical differences were driving up rates of measles in the U.S., a disease thought to have been eliminated in 2000. According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly half of U.S. children are under-vaccinated because of delays or refusals by their parents.
Last year, our country experienced the largest outbreak of pertussis, or whooping cough, in 70 years. According to the CDC, Arkansas had the lowest rate of vaccination in the country in 2012-2013. This is due in some part to our state law that allows an exemption if the immunization “conflicts with the religious or philosophical beliefs of the parent or guardian.”
Mississippi, on the other hand, doesn’t allow non-medical exemptions. Their vaccination rate, at 99.9 percent, was the highest in the land.
Blake Rutherford is vice president of the McLarty Companies. He lives in Little Rock and Philadelphia and be reached at [email protected].
Perspective, Pages 85 on 09/29/2013