Photo by Hyttalo Souza on Unsplash

My health teacher doesn’t believe in vaccines.

You’re probably thinking: How can a health teacher not believe in vaccines? If I had an answer, I’d offer it to you. I don’t.

Until I took her class, I thought my friends were joking when they said their public high school health teacher told them not to get vaccinated. It was just another high school inside joke I was missing out on, another story that’d been passed down for years with no truth to it.

The story was true.

I don’t think enough people recognize how prevalent the anti-vax movement truly is. Everyone knows of someone who won’t let their child get vaccinated, but it’s rarely personal. Usually, anti-vaxxers like that form little echo chambers for themselves, bubbles where fact is questioned and fiction is blindly accepted as truth. Very few people, at least in my experience, have met an anti-vaxxer in the flesh.

My goal isn’t to send the Internet pitchfork army chasing after my health teacher. My goal is to help those who, for some reason or another, choose to stand in the face of scientific consensus understand why they’re wrong.

I’ve seen the lies my teacher has been led to believe. For her sake, and the sake of anti-vaxxers everywhere, I want to explain once and for all why vaccines are good and the anti-vax movement is a sham.

Another teacher once told me that beliefs can be changed by two things: fear and evidence. Fear scares anti-vaxxers into their uninformed beliefs. Hopefully evidence can bring them back to the side of reason.

Where Do Anti-Vaxxers Find Their Research?

One day, a friend of mine came into our fourth period class together looking even more smug than usual for a high schooler. He had yet another story about his health teacher. His story went something like this:

“Today, our health teacher actually told us that vaccines are bad for you. I asked her for a source, and she gave me a link to an Infowars article!”

The superiority of evidence is a common go-to argument for those of us in favor of vaccines. My source is reputable and reliable, we think, and theirs is from some joke of a website! However, anti-vaxxers tend to tune this argument out; they feel like they know something the pro-vaccine “sheeple” don’t.

Most anti-vaxxers get their facts from a source far more insidious than blatantly biased websites like Infowars. This source, the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute, or CMSRI, is terrifying because of its implied credibility. Everything from the logo design to the website layout looks legitimate. Even I was fooled for a moment the first time I visited, swindled into assuming that quality web design could legitimize pseudoscience.

The CMSRI website’s elegant and innocuous design, like a fancy label on a bottle of snake oil, is a facade to distract naive readers from the lies lurking beneath the surface.

Each study the CMSRI writes about is designed to sound real. For example, an article about the relationship between the hepatitis B vaccine and obesity is littered with fancy terms like “methodologically robust findings” and “early postnatal risk” used only to legitimize the article as real science. The CMSRI is, of course, not real science.

The stated mission of the CMSRI is to fund research into the dangers of vaccines. They pay for studies that repeat what they want to hear. The CMSRI’s propaganda machine pushes out studies that aren’t scientifically sound — and when they can’t keep up their faux veneer of legitimacy, they just turn to blatant propaganda.

The propaganda of the CMSRI.

It’s a bit ironic that the cover of Vaccine Dangers talks about science being ignored.

However, just appealing to common sense won’t be enough to convince anti-vaxxers who have been suckered in by the CMSRI. Explaining why these studies and the authors who write them are illegitimate is, from my experience, much more convincing.

How Does the CMSRI Lie?

To understand what’s wrong with the CMSRI, it’s important to understand the father-son duo writing their fake studies: Mark and David Geier.

Mark, the father, has quite the history when dealing with legitimate medical institutions. He was forced to stop a research project in 2004 by the Genetic Centers of America for disingenuous data collection. Geier’s continued refusals to conduct legitimate research led to his medical license being suspended by Maryland in 2011. The nine other states in which Geier was licensed soon suspended him as well.

Mark Geier has also been documented violating basic medical rules because of his own outlandish beliefs. Perhaps the most egregious example of his quackery comes from 2009, where Mark and David claimed to have developed a cure for autism: Lupron, a drug used to chemically castrate sex offenders.

After exile from the medical community, the Geier duo turned to a less-legitimate source for their research funding: the CMSRI. In exchange for churning out anti-vaccine studies, the CMSRI agreed to let the duo continue their research under the guise of a legitimate agency.

The Geiers soon discovered a loophole in American medical recording which would allow them to misrepresent data on a whole new level. The trick to finding skewed data to support anti-vaccine conclusions, they discovered, was the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. The VAERS was created to compile instances of adverse medical events after vaccinations. These adverse medical events are unverifiable and self-reported by site users — a flaw acknowledged by the creators of the database itself. Most falsified reports of vaccine dangers are difficult to detect, but some are far easier to detect. Reports that the Geiers included in their research blame vaccines for drowning, suffocation, and even car accidents.

The VAERS data is a sham. A falsehood. An outright lie. The Geier duo knows this — they used to be licensed doctors, after all. However, they choose to continue to push out anti-vax studies so they can continue to receive funding. Naive anti-vaxxers like my health teacher use these studies to reaffirm their prior beliefs and the cycle of lies continues.

And the CMSRI is succeeding.

Over the past decade, America’s attitude towards vaccines has soured. In 2018, only 70 percent of Americans believed vaccines are very important to the health of society, down from 80 percent in 2008. Chart credit to Zogby Analytics and Research America.

More and more Americans are beginning to doubt science and the established medical community. More and more Americans are turning to modern-day snake oil salesmen for decisions about the health of their children. This trend is real and this trend is terrifying.

Please, Give Science A Chance

The next few words can be read as an open letter to anti-vaxxers. If you’re one of the 70 percent of Americans who believes that vaccines are very important to the health of society, the next few words will be preaching to the choir. However, if you’re an anti-vaxxer who’s willing to listen to what I have to say, hear me out:

I understand the appeal of conspiracy theories. I understand the feeling that you’re being lied to. I understand why, when it comes to choices about the life of your child, these ideas are even more appealing.

However, the government isn’t lying about vaccines. Here is a chart of child mortality rates between 1935 and 2007. Now, correlation doesn’t always imply causation, but in this case it does. The impact of vaccines on child mortality cannot be understated.

Child mortality rates plummeted between 1935 and 2007 as child vaccination rates skyrocketed. Graphic courtesy of On The Fence About Vaccines.

Everyone wants to protect their child. However, choosing not to vaccinate not only puts your child in danger, but other children as well. In Washington, a measles outbreak has infected 53 people, 47 of whom are unvaccinated. And you won’t be the one getting sick. It’s your child who will be at risk. Of the 53 victims of the Washington outbreak, 38 are children under 10.

Claims that vaccines cause autism or obesity or any other scary-sounding threat to your child’s well-being are scary. They’re also lies. Studies that claim to prove this fearmongering offer no scientific explanation for their conclusion, draw from falsified data, are authored by sham doctors with revoked medical licenses, and are funded by a biased organization that profits off of people like you falling into their web of lies.

It’s okay to admit you’re wrong. You’re not a bad person because of a misguided belief you hold. Please, for everybody’s sake, accept scientific consensus and get your child vaccinated. You’ll be a better person for it.

Don’t Mock Anti-Vaxxers

The last 200 words or so were directed at anti-vaxxers themselves. The next 200 will be for those of you who feel superior to anti-vaxxers.

If you’re making fun of anti-vaxxers, you’re a part of the problem.

Bullying anti-vaxxers probably makes you feel intelligent or superior to them. It’s an alluring proposition. And attacking anti-vaxxers is low hanging fruit: a majority of Americans will be on your side of the argument, and it’s easy to appear as if you have the moral high ground.

However, the dopamine rush you get from being a condescending jerk online isn’t wort the long-term effect you have on the people you’re attacking. When anti-vaxxers have their beliefs challenged by personal attacks and jokes rather than by evidence and non-patronzing arguments, they feel backed into a corner. Instead of being receptive to your argument, anti-vaxxers will simply reaffirm their beliefs — after all, in their mind, you had to personally attack them because you couldn’t actually answer their argument.

When you come across an anti-vaxxer, don’t bully them or launch a personal attack. Instead, try to create a real conversation, a calm dialogue in which the goal isn’t to argue but rather to agree. Try to understand why they believe what they do, and try to stay civil and explain why their belief is wrong without attacking their intelligence.

When it comes to vaccinations, winning Internet slap fights doesn’t mean anything. What matters is ensuring that more children are vaccinated and more lives are saved.