Why, Anti-vaxxer?

Source: Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SIX MILLION TO 1! That is better odds than winning the U.S. Powerball lottery in a single try. It is the present odds of staying out of the hospital and not dying by receiving a COVID-19 vaccination. You cannot have better betting odds than that. As of this post, a 63-year-old man in Hong Kong died after receiving a COVID-19 shot. We still do not know if the death was in any way caused by the vaccination. In the U.S., more than eighty million residents have had at least one shot with no hospitalizations reported.

And yet, according to recent polls, 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely will not accept a COVID-19 vaccine or will only if required to.

I want to be clear about vaccines. In past posts, some replies were from anti-vaxxers who honestly believe that the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines was too fast to be validly safe. One was from a reader who claimed that vaccinations for women would cause birth-defects and autism in future pregnancies. Another claimed that vaccines cause sterilization, and another claimed we would no longer be who and what we are after the vaccine enters the bloodstream.

These comments, I trust, came from sensible and honest people. So what is at the root of all this noise? The single, biggest subterfuge, besides the Alex Jones nonsense bluffs, involves Andrew Wakefield.

Asking anti-vaxxers why they would not take the vaccine

Let us be clear. What started all this anti-vaxxing dogma? What prompted all these vaccination worries and false claims? Those worries did not come from one opinion store. I asked several anti-vaxxers why they would say no to the vaccine. None pointed to any one theory, not Tuskegee, not Andrew Wakefield, and certainly not the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

In the 1950s, when I was a kid, the polio vaccine was thought of as a miracle. Everyone knew someone who had the illness. There were almost no known polio anti-vaxxers then. The word did not exist. Vaccine backlashes came in the 1970s related to whooping cough vaccines, through a barrage of unsubstantiated causal connections. Skepticism continued until the end of the century when Wakefield, a surgeon at The Royal Free Hospital in London, published his findings on the subject of vaccinations.

On February 28, 1998, his infamous paper, titled “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children” appeared in the highly respectable British medical journal The Lancet. It suggested that vaccinations could lead to autism. That paper was later exposed as critically flawed and was retracted. Wakefield’s name was removed from the British medical register and he was stripped of his license to practice. But by then, the damage was already done.

The myth

It's reminiscent of the claim and persistent myth that Inuit have 400 words for snow. For Eskimos, snow is just a root that needs a qualifier. There are downy white flakes of crystallized water; piles of packed snow on the ground measured in inches; drifts of snow or sleet; slushy dirty snow at the edge of roads; and anything else that remotely resembles the image of that white stuff that falls from the sky.

Eskimos do not have 400 words for snow, far from it. That myth has remained debunked for more than half a century, yet it continues. Once in charge of widespread conviction, a myth tends to be almost impossible to erase from common belief.

There were hidden variables in Wakefield’s research; there always are in anyone’s research. In our enormously complex universe, they are the invisible strings that link the causes of everything. We think in local terms without regard to the manifold interactions between the parts that make up our world, from subatomic particles to galaxies and from biochemical life forms to conscious beings.

Sometimes and not rarely, two variables appear to have some statistical connection by chance, or through a third variable. When that happens, we see an illusory link. Without spotting the hidden variables, we are likely to mistakenly believe all sorts of nonsense, like the idea that to get good college grades, one should start smoking because “cigarette smokers make higher college grades than nonsmokers.”

The fluke

It so happens that vaccinations are given to infants when they are between 1 and 4 years old. By fluke, that is the age range at which autism symptoms first appear. There is no causal connection, but rather two frameworks of time that coincide. That is one of the unfortunate errors behind the coincidental overlapping of timeframes—the emergence of autism with an MMR vaccine that protects children against measles, mumps, and rubella.

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Of course, It’s natural for parents of children with autism to look for a cause and, in some cases, blame. As someone who spent a few years collecting coincidence stories for Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence, I am fully aware that at any one moment in time, billions of seemingly connected events occur with no causal relation to each other. The timing of vaccination and emergence of autism traits happens to be one such fluke. Carefully done, statistical analyses can estimate the odds of a causal connection, not give a cause. Too often, people confuse coincidence with evidence, and when they do, a trail of uncontrollable anecdotal evidence-blathering emerges.

The polls

According to Carnegie Mellon University COVID-19 research surveys in the U.S., approximately 30% of 181,278 survey responses answered "no" to the following question: If a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 were offered to you today, would you definitely or probably choose to get vaccinated?

On January 27, 2021, 74.6% said yes. One month later, 69.9% said yes. Since November 1, 2020, a consistent 30% of responses were negative. But why? Why would someone choose to decline a vaccine that could save his or her life when more than 80 million Americans have had a COVID-19 vaccine, none of them hospitalized for COVID-19? Everyone has a different reason, but the root of the reason is likely confusion coming from online waves of disinformation.

The danger

So what, some say. Let the herd take down the virus. Unfortunately, that permits the virus to hang around long enough to mutate into something far more powerful, sufficiently aggressive to repeat the loop we’ve been in for a year, and fiercely beat the vaccines at their game. The antibody-evading E484K variant is already with us and called “Eeeek” by those who study it. What next?

© 2021 Joseph Mazur