Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Dorian Yates, a member of the Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice.
Is it customary for doctors to continue prescribing a drug when it isn’t working? And to prescribe that drug to more and more people when it isn’t effective? Worse yet, what if the drug was contributing to the very disease it was supposed to combat — how long would doctors insist people take the drug?
For the sake of all the patients, I hope that it would not be long at all. I would hope that doctors would employ critical thinking skills and realize that, as Albert Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”
Good leaders are not those who fix a problem using the very thing that is contributing to the problem — they think outside of the box. To borrow another quote from Albert Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Does this sound familiar to the Department of Health?
The adult pertussis vaccine campaign resembles the sale bin at a department store with shoddy, overstocked items that don’t work.
Vaccine rates in adults for pertussis are no different now than they ever have been. What is different is that, according to state epidemiologist Patsy Kelso, 90-100 percent of pertussis cases are in vaccinated people. This should be a clue that there is something wrong with the vaccine, not with adults who have not been vaccinated in a long time. A 2010 pertussis vaccine study in Clinical and Vaccine Immunology found that, “As vaccine coverage increases, vaccine-mediated immunity may induce selection for strains that are less affected by the vaccine.” Sounds like it’s no secret that the pertussis vaccine is contributing to the epidemic rather than controlling it.
The Department of Health is asking people to use a drug that is inferior, ineffective and may actually be adding to the problem. In addition, the vaccine it is promoting is not just for pertussis, but includes tetanus and diphtheria. Is the department suggesting that we are having a diphtheria epidemic as well? A tetanus epidemic? Furthermore, the drug it is pushing contains aluminum, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde and 2-phenoxyethanol — ingredients no healthy person wants to ingest. Pertussis vaccines are manufactured by drug companies — these are drugs that are not working. When drugs don’t work, common sense would say that you do not spend $70,000 of taxpayer dollars to order more of them and campaign for all adults to take them. Rather, that would seem a case for the FDA since clearly the efficacy of the drug is in grave question.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress on the importance of protecting consumer rights. His sage words included:
“If consumers are offered inferior products, if prices are exorbitant, if drugs are unsafe or worthless, if the consumer is unable to choose on an informed basis, then his dollar is wasted, his health and safety may be threatened, and the national interest suffers.”
The Department of Health would be wise to heed President Kennedy’s words. The adult pertussis vaccine campaign resembles the sale bin at a department store with shoddy, overstocked items that don’t work. The call on Vermonters to “step up and do their part” smacks more of an attempt to market a soon-to-be discontinued, and therefore worthless product, rather than an innovative approach to disease care. We don’t need a bigger boat, we need an altogether different boat. For all of our health’s sake, stop pushing an ineffective drug on the taxpayers of Vermont. Stop the insanity.
