A New York Times guest commentary published last week purports to explain “Why So Many People Are Resisting Vaccination”. The author, Nina Burleigh, author of Virus: Vaccinations, the C.D.C. and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic, writes:
Early in the 20th century, it was no uncommon for children to suffer the agonies of infectious diseases or witness family members who did. Children got terribly sick and died at home. Their survivors—including some of our grandparents and great-grandparents—were intimately acquainted with the sights, sounds and smells of dying and with the deaths of siblings or their own small children.
Thankfully, those traumatic experiences are long past us. Americans born after the mid-20th century belong to the vaccine-spoiled generations. Most probably don’t know what diphtheria is or that it was a leading cause of childhood death in the United States before immunizations became widespread.
She then writes how she “came to this understanding while writing a short book about the Covid-19 pandemic”, during which she “became interested in how we came to forget our vulnerability and even disregard or grow suspicious of the vaccines that have saved countless lives.” She bemoans how “one in four Americans said they would decline the Covid-19 vaccines.”
She attributes this to “distrust and conspiracy theories arising from vaccine mishaps or failures.” Further on, she states:
Still, vaccines have mostly eradicated many of the diseases that once plagued Americans. Children in the United States are now jabbed with some 15 vaccines that protect against diseases such as hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.
To explain why a considerable proportion of Americans intend not to get a COVID-19 vaccine, she suggests that the start of the pandemic “coincided with antipathy among a sector of Americans toward science and experts.”
“Conspiracy theories and charges of fake news during the 2016 election cycle and the years that followed”, she adds, “highlighted and promoted distrust in experts.”
Another reason for this “vaccine hesitancy”, she writes, “is what I call Cold War bad science.” Nuclear weapons tests, CIA mind-control experiments, secret activities at Area 51 in Nevada, and biological weapons development at an Army base in Maryland all “help explain why so many Americans are willing to believe conspiracy theories and mistrust the official story.”
In sum, people are “resistant” to getting a COVID-19 vaccine because they just fail to understand how awesome vaccines are. The “hesitant” fail to remember how that the dramatic decline in deaths from infectious diseases that was seen during the twentieth century was all thanks to the awesomeness of vaccines. They have an irrational distrust of experts and choose instead to believe in conspiracy theories about vaccines because they simply dislike science.
But this a load of asinine nonsense that tells us absolutely nothing about why many of us will not be getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
The real reason so many people “mistrust the official story” is because the official story is demonstrable bullshit. This is illustrated easily enough by the official mythology Nina Burleigh presents in her article as though historical fact.
She attributes the decline in diphtheria mortality to the diphtheria toxoid, which was developed in the early 1920s but did not come into widespread use until the early 1930s. In the early 1940s, it was included in the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine.
But compare her dogmatic repetition of information we are all supposed to regard as historical reality with the historical data available from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the diphtheria mortality rate:
As you can see, what the data show, contrary to the official story as dutifully regurgitated by Nina Burleigh in America’s “newspaper of record”, the diphtheria vaccine had no obvious impact on the already declining mortality rate.
She mentions measles, the vaccine for which was licensed in 1963, so let’s repeat this exercise using the data on measles mortality:
As you can see, nearly all of the decline in measles mortality occurred before the vaccine was introduced.
Let’s try again with pertussis:
Clearly, Nina Burleigh is not a credible source from which to obtain an answer to the question of why many of us will not be getting a COVID-19 vaccine. I would be happy to explain the real reasons to her, but she would have to first forgive me for having committed heresy against her vaccine religion by choosing to believe the scientific data over official mythology.
And therein lies the true reason for the “resistance” that so perplexes the religion’s faithful adherents, which they will never grasp as long as they cling to their dogma instead taking an honest look at the science and recognizing that there are legitimate reasons for people to choose not to get the vaccine.
It’s true – mortality dropped way before these vaccines. But looking at this some time ago, I remember also seeing that the number of infections for these diseases seemed to drop markedly just after the vaccines were introduced. So do vaccines work? The drop in mortality could be due, perhaps, to more ready access to better treatment…?
Measles is an example where you can see that the vaccine had an effect on incidence, whereas mortality had already dropped before the vaccine due to other causes related to an increasing standard of living, such as better nutrition (vitamin A deficiency, for example, is a known risk factor for severe measles). Measles infection during childhood not only conferred lifelong immunity but appears to have conferred other health benefits, as well. It’s been associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer, for example. The loss of natural boosting due to reexposure also means that if vaccine-conferred immunity wanes, adults who are at higher risk than school-aged children can become vulnerable once again, and mothers today who were vaccinated and never experienced infection are less well able to confer passive maternal immunity to their babies. Infection was mostly constrained in the pre-vaccine era to an age at which it generally caused a benign illness or no symptoms at all.
Great work, Jeremy. Too bad the newspaper of record will not publish a counter point article on this subject, but you should submit one anyway. Another good source of the history of vaccines using original material is the book Dissolving Illusions by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk.
Yes, Dissolving Illusions is highly informative. For the reason you identified, I don’t think it would be a productive use of my time to submit a corrective article to the Times.
Man, you are beyond amazing!! The truthfulness and complete accuracy of your journalism is priceless and so critical to healthy thinking folks in today’s world of “ill-minded” and ignorant medical, political and main stream media junkies.
You, and some of your colleagues such as Dr. Mercola, Robert Kennedy Jr., America’s Frontline Doctors…..help us to stay focused on the truth. Thank you Jeremy!!
Thank you for the compliment to my work.
You can give her credit for not repeating the standard Dr. Wakefield is responsible for vaccine hesitancy.
? Yes. Yes, her article has that going for it.
Graphing deaths the way you did is a very poor way of demonstrating the effects of vaccines, and is a common antivaccine tactic, unfortunately. If you look at graphs of incidence instead you see a dramatic decline in cases after each vaccine was introduced. Cases of diphtheria in the US declined from 5,796 cases and 410 deaths in 1950 to zero just a few decades later, thanks to the vaccine. Those hundreds of deaths each year, mostly children, look like nothing on your graph, which is very misleading.
The introduction of science-based medicine meant that doctors got a lot better at preventing children with diphtheria and other vaccine-preventable diseases from dying, but they are still horrible diseases with morbidity and serious sequelae that are well worth preventing. I wouldn’t wish diphtheria on anyone, even if they did survive.
Graphing mortality the way I did is a very excellent way of demonstrating that the claim that the decline in mortality is attributable entirely to vaccines is a bald-faced lie, with such lies being a common “pro-vaccine” tactic (to borrow your own terminology; I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccine but simply pro truth and pro informed consent).
Correlation does not equal causation. You say cases declined because of the vaccine, but that’s just correlation, as provaxxers love to say about vaccine injuries.
To evaluate the comments above, I would like to see the graphs Krebiozen mentions. Did anyone study the difference of incidence of infection of those diseases between those vaccinated and those who were not?
Indeed, as JP says, correlation does not equal causation, and the increasingly lower death rate before the introduction of vaccines is compelling. However, if the incidence of infection dropped dramatically after the introduction of vaccines, and could be shown as the difference between vaccinated and non-vaccinated people, that would also be rather compelling.
In 1970, Dr Edward H. Kass, of Harvard, gave a
speech to the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, of which he was then President. He warned his colleagues that drawing false
conclusions about why mortality rates had declined so much could cause them to focus on the wrong things.
He said:
“…we had accepted some half truths and had stopped
searching for the whole truths. The principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past —tuberculosis,
diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc. —and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life
expectancy, thus providing the American people with the highest level of health available in the world. That these are half truths is known but is perhaps not
as well known as it should be.”
In 1977, Boston University epidemiologists John
and Sonja McKinlay published a seminal work on the role vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive decline in mortality seen in the
twentieth century.
The McKinlay’s study was titled, “The Questionable
Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century.”
Their data showed:
“that the introduction of specific medical
measures and/or the expansion of medical services are generally not responsible.
le for most of the modern decline in mortality.”
Good, short data article. But, the next question is, how did the rates drop naturally over decades. I have to assume the Human body adapted, and we developed the natural immunity over time with no synthetic help. Why would Wuhan be any different?? All we have done is introduce a treatment during a pandemic, possibly causing a dangerous mutation. Thoughts? Tr
The mortality rate declined due, generally, to factors related to an increasing standard of living (in addition to development of population immunity). Better nutrition, sanitation, hygiene practices, etc.
Yes, mass vaccination against COVID-19 could itself put evolutionary pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to mutate into an “escape” variant, potentially one that is even more virulent.