the first vaccine was invented in seventeen 96 it treated smallpox in 1980 smallpox was eradicated a disease that had changed the course of human history was gone forever because of a concerted Public Health effort polio T 2 once known as childhoods greatest killer is on its last legs it is found in only two countries Pakistan and Afghanistan and in 2019 there were only 30 reported cases and public health efforts are going well in 2000 the United States was declared free of measles free of an incredibly contagious and dangerous disease and yet in 2019 there were
a hundred and 18 cases of measles in the US but how vaccine hesitancy is defined as their reluctance or refusal to vaccinate even when vaccines are available we have beaten back diseases with the greatest weapons of modern medicine but we are currently losing ground because people are refusing them in many ways vaccines have become victims of their own success because we have forgotten the disease's they prevent we have forgotten the birth defects caused by measles we have forgotten when stepping on a rusty nail meant death by tetanus we have forgotten that in 1918 10 percent
of the world's population died in an influenza outbreak we have forgotten a time when many women were the mothers of more dead children than living we have forgotten but we cannot afford to as the percentage of the population that has vaccinated drops we lose what is curled herd immunity which protects the vulnerable people in our society who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons I want to address this issue of vaccine hesitancy and suggest ways to curb it everything from marketing to laws because we cannot wait on this issue we cannot wait until children with leukemia
are dying of whooping coughs countries where that disease has been a memory for more than half a century so who experiences vaccine hesitancy it has always been associated with fringe political beliefs so really far left hippies are really far-right Nazis this link can be seen with the election of anti-establishment parties in Europe being linked to a lack of belief in vaccine importance now the rise of nationalism isn't what I'm here to talk to you about today and this isn't the kind of vaccine hesitancy I'm here to talk to you about today I want to talk
to you about it as it occurs in ordinary people who hold otherwise ordinary beliefs now most of this vaccine hesitancy revolves around the myth and I say myth that vaccines cause autism they don't now this myth was catapulted into the mainstream consciousness in 1999 when Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet Journal suggesting a possible link between the MMR vaccine measles mumps and rubella and autism now note that I said Andrew Wakefield and not dr. Andrew Wakefield because after it was discovered he purposefully tampered with the results of the experiments which by the way
only had 12 participants his medical license was revoked and the paper was retracted now in the long run it hasn't mattered that Wakefield was disgraced and his paper discredited because the fear has stuck in people's minds and propagated through Mommy Facebook groups harrowing accounts of bright and attentive children regressing from touch after receiving the shot people think how could this have happened to so many other people and not be true the answer there is very simple the CDC in World horth Health Organization's recommended date for receiving the MMR vaccine and the age when the first
signs of autism appear are very very close together but pure coincidence is not what sad and grieving parents want to hear they want to cause they want something and someone to blame so what was the last thing that happened before their child's behavior changed well they got injected with a scary syringe by a man in a white coat that seems suspicious doesn't it and look at how many other parents this has happened to so the fear spreads and this fear about the safety of vaccines is exacerbated by the fact that scientific community and the ordinary
community don't speak using the same terminology when scientists say there is no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism people will ask for a study that proves there is no link without realizing you can't prove a negative in the way that I can't prove that if one of those lovely people up in the booth decided to jump out they wouldn't be able to fly I couldn't prove that but I know it won't happen and you know that too and in the same way scientists know vaccines do not cause autism so how do we prevent
this fear from spreading on an individual level now though my personal motto is to fight fire with the fire department people who experience vaccine hesitancy don't like competent authority figures so in this case we're going to have to fight it with fire or in this case fight fear with fear we have to make people more afraid of the diseases vaccines prevent than they are of autism we need to show them more pictures like this part of the issue is marketing on one side of the debate we have wall-to-wall scare mongering the best that money can
buy terrifying photos of children crying mothers everything everything everything and on the other side we have bubbly government health ports within personal language and smiling children which one is gonna scare parents more the CDC doesn't need to change its recommended date for vaccines it needs to change its marketing and it's not as if they don't have anything to work with the list of things that I can think of thirsty than polio diphtheria tetanus and measles is actually pretty short instead of websites like this they need more pictures like this of tetanus the arched and breaking
spine of children in iron lungs breathing for them because they were paralyzed by polio we need to tell them stories of children coughing themselves blue and breaking their ribs with whooping cough we need to show them all that see how scary Asperger's seems now though this debate is often framed as one of personal liberty I'm going to push back against that very very far because we must remember that when someone decides not to vaccinate their child it's not that just then they're putting in danger it's not even just their child it's everyone else as well
because of herd immunity that protects people who are too weak to be vaccinated no mother or father's personal liberties is worth the life of an immunocompromised person as the famous saying goes your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins once those decisions start harming other people liberties start to dissipate now it's not as if the risk run by someone not being vaccinated is low I will give you this example if everyone in this auditorium were unvaccinated and one person had measles almost all of us would have been exposed to the disease by
now and of those people exposed 90% would catch it 90 and of those 90 28% would succumb to the disease is that one person's decision to make because there is no greater well of wisdom in this world than Internet comic strips I will quote one for you on the accomplishments of the field of biology and medicine the heroes of my field have slain one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and they really have it is truly exceptional that I can say that every person in this auditorium has every expectation that every child they have
or will have will live past the age of five that is not something that could have been said for the rest of human history but we cannot keep this up if people refuse vaccines we live in a very odd world where some mothers will walk ten kilometres with their children in order to get them vaccinated and others will fight their own governments so they don't have to now in this whole debate we focused on parents their decisions their rationale their reasons their feelings but I would like to end my speech for a moment on the
children this decision is being made for and how that impacts them I want to tell you a story about a six-year-old boy in the US state of Oregon in 2017 he got tetanus because he was not vaccinated against the disease and he cut his leg on a rusty nail on his parents farm six days after he cut his leg he had to be airlifted to a hospital he was experiencing uncontrollable muscle spasms the clenched jaw and the characteristic arched spine that boy that six year old boy was in the ICU on a ventilator for 45
days can you imagine the pain and fear he was experiencing can you imagine not being able to control your own body or breathe on your own can you imagine the fear that six-year-old child felt thinking he might die but I will tell you that's a very good piece of news he lived those hard-working doctors and nurses saved him in part with an emergency dose of the tetanus vaccine and when his parents got their little boy back after all of that do you know what they all did they refused the follow-up shot they were willing to
put their child through all of that again and I want to ask you do you really think that that was their decision to make because in my personal opinion had that boy not been saved his parents would have committed negligent homicide by doing that to their own child a child who deserves all the protections of modern medicine just like anybody else's child now normally I would say you can leave the care of your fellow denizens of this earth up to doctors and nurses we don't send them to medical school for nothing but in this case
you have a positive moral responsibility to be vaccinated in order to protect their health to protect the most vulnerable in our society those who cannot be protected by vaccines you have a moral duty to walk down to your local clinic and get all your shots and boosters and vaccinate your kid on time just in the way that you would have a moral responsibility to save someone who would die if you didn't and on the plus side if you're a very good girl or boy when you go and get your shot you might even get a
lollipop thank you [Applause]
