Can You Solve the Pro Vaxxers Holy Grail

I'm Curious. It's Important

"Mom?" My older daughter asked me as we drove to Cedar Point for her 14th birthday. "I know you're anti-vaxxer and all, but are there some vaccines that you are okay with?"

I love driving places with my children. They ask such great questions. "I'm not sure anyone is anti-vaxxer, in the strictest sense of the word. It exists on a continuum." 

I explained to my daughter then about BCG versus Gardasil. The former I have a relatively good opinion about as vaccines go, as it is a one time shot giving lifelong immunity, with a pretty okay side effect profile, and is used to treat a bacterial infection of the lungs that causes Tuberculosis, a disease that kills millions worldwide every single year. Gardasil, meanwhile, may or may not prevent HPV ( human papillomavirus), which may or may not prevent cervical cancer (in people who have a cervix, formerly known as females, girls, or women) hypothetically decades later, if you believe the industry funded studies, which buried a lot of really bad reactions to the aluminum. Everything I read said that was the worst vaccine until the conjabs came along. The flu jab was more litigated but these were adults given it on an every year basis.

So yes, my feelings about vaccines exist on a continuum. But for those who would like to throw out the baby with the bathwater I will give the following scenario.

Let's say that you go to put your trash out one night. Perhaps you hear some rumbling and notice the top of the bin is askew. When you open the bin a raccoon, clearly foaming at the mouth and violent, launches into your arm, sinking its teeth into your arm and cutting through your flesh into the bone. After a few minutes you are able to dislodge this crazed raccoon, which you kill with a shovel. Obviously you need to go to the hospital. You take the now dead raccoon with you.

The doctors dissect the racoons brain immediately and tell you what you feared: the creature absolutely has rabies. They want you to take a series of injections which you do know, as an anti-vaxxer, are pretty dangerous as jabs go (based on US military who are given it in advance). Or you can deal with rabies, a disease which has a 100% fatality rate in known infections.

What do you do? Tick tock. As Clint Eastwood would say "Are you feeling lucky?"

My guess is virtually everyone, myself included, would take the jabs in this situation. This is why I call it the Holy Grail of the true antivax paradigm. Until you've solved rabies, you haven't solved anything.

I've seen a lot of recent worries about reemergent smallpox. That one I pray about myself. On the one hand early experiments were a failure based on the antivax history of things. On the other hand this is a DNA based virus, which thus doesn't mutate and has no animal reservoirs. It was the perfect candidate for vaccine success, in short. But nobody has gotten jabbed for this in 40 years. 

If it were to spread in a naive population, which most of the world is, I do ask myself how it would play out. I don't actually know, and I can't even speculate. I would say that anybody who abetted or stored or released such a thing would need to be hung for crimes against humanity. How do you fix or treat a disease with a 30% fatality rate traditionally? You'd have to wait for information to come in and adapt as fast as possible to it.

But I still think if you want to be truly counted amongst the hardcore antivax, you'd better solve rabies. Then we'll talk. Okay?