Vaccine myths frustrate doctors
October 29, 2009
Joanna Smith
OTTAWA BUREAU
OTTAWA–He says it is like believing that umbrellas cause downpours and blaming ice cream for sunburns.
"I guess what frustrates me is the amount of mythology out there," Dr. David Butler-Jones, head of the federal public health agency, told reporters this week when asked about theories and fears about swine flu vaccine circulating online and in school parking lots.
"The anti-vaccine movement, really, its efforts are to create doubt, so they keep throwing things out. `Oh, it causes brain damage.' Well, you prove that it doesn't cause brain damage. `Oh, it causes cancer.' Well, you prove it doesn't cause cancer. `Oh, it causes your car radio to die,'" Butler-Jones said.
The so-called anti-vaccine movement – a loose collection of concerned parents and PhDs on the lecture circuit trying to educate the public about perceived dangers of immunization – has been around for decades but has gained strength with the rise of social networking and citizen journalism.
They swap lists of vaccine ingredients. They analyze medical research. Celebrity couple Jenny McCarthy (whose son was diagnosed with autism) and Jim Carrey, through their non-profit organization Generation Rescue, link vaccines to autism.
The Vaccination Risk Awareness Network does not tell people what to do, said its coordinator, Edda West. "We absolutely never go there. We don't have the right to take upon ourselves responsibility for what other people do with their health," West said Tuesday from Winlaw, B.C. "Our role is to put out information that we can from all sorts of sources."
But public health officials worry the ideas of the anti-vaccine movement at least superficially play a role in pushing people who may be already hesitant to get the H1N1 vaccine into the "no, thanks" camp.
The officials think that camp is already big enough. The federal government was under heavy pressure all summer to rush its vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline Inc., but now that it's finally here polls have shown about half of the country does not plan to get it.
West refers to the work of epidemiologist Tom Jefferson of the international research network Cochrane Collaboration, who has been outspoken in his condemnation of the seasonal flu vaccine. His team of researchers tore apart hundreds of flu studies and dismissed all but four of them as garbage.
"Nothing changed. Everything was just business as usual. The medical establishment is choosing to ignore that study," said West, who has been interested in vaccine safety since her daughter, now 33, developed a severe case of measles after a childhood immunization.
Not only does West believe the H1N1 influenza vaccine would be ineffective but also that it could be dangerous due to one of the ingredients GlaxoSmithKline has put into the adjuvant – an additive that stretches supply and boosts immunity – mixed with the antigen in a dose of its vaccine.
That ingredient is squalene and a quick online search tells you it is derived from fish oil and the main suspect in a government conspiracy.
Dr. Donald Low, microbiologist-in-chief in the department of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, mentioned it first in the list of persistent vaccine rumours he has encountered.
"During the Gulf War, the soldiers were vaccinated against anthrax and then you had the Gulf War Syndrome," said Low, referring to an illness known to cause sudden bursts of violence that a Pentagon report eventually linked to exposure to chemical agents.
"They tried to blame that on the anthrax vaccine and claimed the anthrax vaccine had squalene in it, when in actual fact it didn't have squalene in it." Squalene, he adds, "has been in adjuvants for years and years and years and been proven safe and effective."
Low sighs when asked how public health officials cope while rolling out the largest immunization campaign in Canadian history.
"It's a real challenge," he said. "The consequence of something like that is huge, because it just adds fuel to the fire. People are on the fence about getting vaccinated and when they hear this it is enough sometimes to push them over to the non-vaccine crowd. ... It's tough."
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