[Music] the number of meos cases linked to the Disneyland theme park continues to grow doctors weigh in and sound the alarm vaccines are one of the greatest achievements in the history of Public Health we thought we had measles essentially licked so why is this disease coming back from the brink of Extinction people are deciding they're afraid of vaccines and that fear is putting the nation's Health at risk how did we get to this point where personal belief is more powerful than science they get this monster shot you ever see the size of it is terrible
we vaccinated our baby and something happened when someone's already sucked into that myth it's a very difficult thing to talk them out of [Music] it the greatest medical news in History Dr Jon discovers a vaccine that promises to wipe out childhood's crippling and killing enemy polio in the 1950s the sulk vaccine was greeted with open arms Civic clubs had immunization parties polio small poox diptheria no longer a threat in the US because of vaccines and in 2000 another watershed moment the CDC reports the measles practically wiped out tonight in the United States but that report
proved overly optimistic measles are back more than 600 cases were reported in the US in 2014 and another disease that looked like it was disappearing a generation ago is also making a comeback whooping cough unlike measles its return is in part attributed to the waning effectiveness of its vaccine but it shows how the spread of a disease can impact the most vulnerable the risk of whooping cough may sound like something from the past but it's still very real today California reported more than 4,200 cases nine people have died all of them infants for San Francisco
mother Mariah biani those numbers are more than just statistics when her son was born in August 2005 as a nurse she realized something was wrong it was just like he was so lethargic and I knew that there was just something I'm like I can't keep them awake he went to the doctor and she said I want you to go to the hospital as soon as he got there he went into cardiac arrest what she didn't realize was that the immunity from her own whooping cough vaccine had worn off and she'd infected her newborn who was
too young to be inoculated and they started CPR right away for probably about 45 minutes or so as a nurse I'm thinking I know what that means your brain is not getting oxygen your body is failing and um the surgeon came out and he said his chance of survival is very low we made the most compassionate decision you could but we just said no don't don't do it just stop Dylan bian died 17 days after he was born vulnerable people like newborns depend on the immunity of those around them to protect them from dangerous diseases
to keep measles from spreading for example about 94% of a community needs to be vaccinated it's called herd immunity in some areas that that's a concern here in Marin County California you have pockets of people who are not vaccinating their children there are certain schools and communities where that rate is as high as 50% and what I fear is that we have an epidemic of measles and outbreak and that we have children that are very ill or that die the measles vaccine has been so effective it doesn't seem like something we need to protect our
children from you have this sort of fundamental Paradox of vaccines that they've become a victim of their own success Seth manukan examines the fear of vaccines in his book The Panic virus the current vaccine scares and controversies that we're still dealing with today stem from a 1998 paper that appeared in the Lancet a very respected medical journal published out of the UK the paper written by Dr Andrew Wakefield claimed there might be a connection between the measles mumps rubella vaccine and autism in his press conference Andrew Wakefield stood up and said parents should not give
their children the MMR vaccine period until we are able to get to the bottom of this the MMR vaccination in combination uh that I think that it should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines the notion that you would take a 12ers case study and make claims about a population as a whole is ridiculous this paper was historically bad and what the media in in the UK did was they ran with that it's a dilemma you know that's a sensational story follow-up studies of hundreds of thousands of children could not find any evidence that
the MMR vaccine causes autism and investigations into wakefield's original paper revealed he distorted the data and acted unethically he's lost his medical license the Lan of paper has been retracted but he had very effective ly positioned himself as a martyr and in some odd way every piece of evidence that comes out against Wakefield sort of solidifies his standing in the community that still pays attention to him another reason fears about vaccine safety persisted is that complicated science proved difficult for public health institutions to communicate case in point their response when concerns were raised over a
vaccine preservative called therasol which contains ethyl Mercury children are getting Mercury injected into into their bodies with vaccines that's right Mercury a known neurotoxin but ethyl Mercury and fosol is not the same as the toxic methyl Mercury which is found in fish and accumulates in the body nevertheless the Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended therasol be removed and their messaging backfired in 1999 Health officials Deni a link between vaccines and the autism epidemic yet urge vaccine makers to take out the mer y just to be safe what the American Academy of
Pediatrics said is we are recommending this step so we can make safe vaccines even safer as a parent if you tell me something safe I don't think that's on a sliding scale I assume that if you say it's safe it is safe for my child it's not safe safer safest there are almost two languages here there's the language of Science and then there's English and in the language of science you have these signifiers like to the best of our knowledge as far as we know based on the available scientific uh uh evidence because you can't
say anything with 100% you can't prove a negative and so when scientists speak in their language and the rest of us translate that into English it sounds like they're saying something very different than they're saying based on what we know right now we don't think that there is an association but that's not saying with 100% certainty there isn't one that is saying that based on the evidence that we have right now we don't think that there is one either because the reporter doesn't understand what's actually going on uh or because they're looking to generate a
story they then take that and make it seem as if the scientists is saying I think there's a possibility that vaccines do cause autism when in fact that's not it at all news organizations should exercise judgment about what goes out over their air Brendan Nyan is a professor at Dartmouth College who studies how misinformation spreads and the role of the media what's particularly important is to think about the overall scientific consensus where is the weight of the evidence and is our reporting reflecting that or not that's what's often gone astray in the vaccine debate it's
time for everyone to redirect the questions toward finding the cause of autism it is not however vaccinations controversial subject not controversial subject controversial for parents who still believe is not controversial Matt it's time for kids to get their V everyday people can't be fact Checkers for every story about vaccines and when journalists don't give people the weight of the scientific evidence they're letting them down she got her vaccinations she ran a lowgrade fever she had a little rash and then she stopped talking a false sense of balance was also created when scientific evidence was equated
with people's personal experiences reporting fell into this on the one hand on the other hand fallacy uh this notion that if you have two sides that are disagree that means that you should present both of them um with equal weight we vaccinated our baby and something happened that's it Jenny McCarthy has had more to do with popularizing the notion that vaccines are dangerous uh than any other single person in the United States We Begin of course with Jenny McCarthy the actress and entertainment person her son Evan has autism she's very smart she's telegenic look it
it's plain and simple it's no it's yes it is excuse me when I look at clips of her it's a completely unfair fight my science is named Evan and he's at home that's my son Jenny McCarthy has said many times and oftentimes very loudly that you know her child is her scientific fact any scientist or any science reporter who's familiar with how science Works would say that no any one person is an anecdote um and the plural of anecdote is not data uh you know it's just a story but stories are powerful while vaccination rates
are high Nationwide there are some religious and ethnic enclaves and communities where well-educated upper middle class people live where vaccine hesitancy runs strong I was interviewing an epidemiologist and he said oh yeah we completely know we're going to have communities that have issues with vaccine uptake we take a map and stick a pin wherever there's a Whole Foods and draw a circle around it and that's where we're going to have problems um he was obviously being factious exasperated Health officials are trying to come up with new ways to communicate with the public Brendan Nyan conducted
a study and watched how hesitant parents reacted when they were shown information from the CDC website stating there's no evidence the MMR vaccine causes autism the good news was it did cause parents to be less likely to believe in the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism the bad news is however that it made them less likely to say they would vaccinate a child which is precisely the opposite of what we would hope to see what we found is that telling people the correct information uh wasn't actually effective that may mean we've reached the point
where Public Health officials in the media can't even talk about vaccine safety without it backfiring but fears generated by the latest measles outbreak may help people understand more clearly the value of vaccines and what's at stake what does it take how many times do you have to tell people or talk about it we all have a role in helping each other to protect each other a vaccine preventable disease should not have killed my son [Music] [Music] [Music]
