TLS Review of Arthur Allen's Vaccine

The debate on vaccinations for children continues in the drawing rooms, at the birth-day parties, cocktail-parties, yoga classes, farmers' market, and cafes of the west-side of Los Angeles. Though of course, no one has a drawing room anymore, nor do they drink cocktails, at least not in company. But the conversation continues. Often shrill enough. And I wonder if either party is educated with a background in science or medicine. Or rather if they haven't just fortified themselves with the accumulated wisdom of the popular press.

John Dwyer recently reviewed Robert Bud's Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (2007) and Arthur Allen's Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver (2007) for the June 29, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, probably the most highly regarded review of books in the English-speaking world. Below, you can find a brief excerpt from Dwyer's review of Allen's work. More to follow in these pages soon.

Vaccine by Arthur Allen, a former foreign correspondent for Associated Press, provided a successful blend of scientific fact, history, controversy, and entertainment….

This brings us to Allen’s third theme, which he explores in some detail: the development of a misguided but powerful and influential anti-vaccination lobby, particularly in the United States. Many of the anti-vaccination zealots whose concepts would have been well accommodated in the seventeenth century, had their convictions shaped by personal pain secondary to a child of their own developing a severe medical problem which they became convinced was a complication following a vaccination. That such scaremongering can have tragic results is all too obvious when, in 1978 in the United Kingdom, rumours that pertussis vaccine could cause permanent brain damage to infants saw immunization rates fall drastically to 31 per cent. As a result, infectious rates, and many children suffered unnecessarily or even died. Similar scenarios were played out in Japan and Sweden. However, exhaustive investigations in a number of countries resulted in epidemiologists concluding that if pertussis vaccine ever caused permanent brain damage the incidence was so low that it was impossible to prove this to be the case. Allen, while sympathetic to the pain of such parents, does eventually expose the flaws in the arguments of opponents to vaccination; he also points out the urgent need for new communication strategies if public health authorities are to restore confidence in safety and efficacy of vaccines.

A long chapter on autism covers similar ground; the author explores the way in which a suspicion of trace amounts of mercury used as a preservative in a number of vaccines, could cause autism became a certainty in the minds of many affected families. Mercury (in large does over a long period of time) has been known since the eighteenth century to cause neurological damage. It was used in the manufacture of hats and resulted in the development of “Mad Hatter’s” disease. Courts in the US actually awarded damages based on this claim, as legal avarice outpaced science. Scientific studies ended up showing that, if anything, children who had received vaccines containing mercury had a lower incidence of autism. Allen’s interview with a mother of a child with autism as she force-feeds him (potentially dangerous) megadoses of vitamins, convinced that this must benefit her son, is profoundly saddening.