Amity Shlaes, Author

(This is not a legal transcript. Bloomberg LP cannot guarantee its accuracy.)

AMITY SHLAES, AUTHOR, TALKS ABOUT VACCINATIONS AT BLOOMBERG SURVEILLANCE

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

SPEAKERS: TOM KEENE, BLOOMBERG SURVEILLANCE HOST

KEN PREWITT, BLOOMBERG SURVEILLANCE CO-HOST

AMITY SHLAES, AUTHOR

9:07

TOM KEENE, BLOOMBERG SURVEILLANCE HOST: With us Amity Shlaes, who dives into the bonfire debate over vaccinations. Amity, good morning.

AMITY SHLAES, AUTHOR: Good morning.

KEENE: Everybody needs to go to Wikipedia, go Wikipedia small pox, and look at the photograph. It is our past. 1979 the WHO announces the eradication of small pox.

Not to inflammatory and say it is back, but your paragraph on whooping cough in fancy Marin County, California is frightening. Tell us about Marin County.

SHLAES: Well, that is a place where many parents, many moms and dads have opted not to vaccinate their child out of perhaps concern. Long ago there was a study linking vaccination to autism. That was discredited, but it is still the fashion. Enough of a fashion that it stirred into an epidemic and they saw ten children die in California of whooping cough.

They have these population clusters where the moms and dads decide not to vaccinate and want to be free riders off the rest, that's the way I would see it. But instead, there are so many of them that they are - that suddenly these little outbreaks are happening to tragic results.

KEENE: Time magazine a few years ago, the outbreaks in Arizona and San Diego of measles can be traced to travel and from Switzerland where many people chose not to be vaccinated. I mean measles is not small pox, but it can harm people.

SHLAES: Well, that is right, and you know what, something about Europeans who vaccinate less, they expect to get sick and they expect to die. Americans expect never to die, and if we want a guarantee that we will never, never get sick, we want to be more on the vaccination end of it. So it is this distinction that makes - puts us in a very strange and unnecessarily dangerous situation.

KEENE: Yes. Ken, I want you to jump in here. I am biased on this. My father's teeth are discolored because he fought off polio as a kid. And I barely remember the fear over polio and the uniform celebration when they put these silly pink drops in our mouths.

They lined us up like cherubs. And it was a miracle. I mean I can remember the parents hysterical in a positive way -

KEN PREWITT, BLOOMBERG SURVEILLANCE CO-HOST: Oh, absolutely.

KEENE: - about this.

PREWITT: Well, I can remember hysterical in fear before the vaccine came out. But, Amity, this all started in 1998 in an article in the Lancet, which is sort of the British version of the AMA Journal, and it was about the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.

Now as you say, this was completely retracted last year, but how did this get from the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to whooping cough and other conditions?

SHLAES: Just through internet hypochondria is the real answer. There was a doctor there named Andrew Wakefield who saw a distinction between - excuse me, a connection between autism and some vaccines.

That got expanded and expanded. The pertussis vaccine as moms and dads know is not in MMR, it is in DTaP, or that's the P - whopping cough. It's another vaccine. But the idea was that all vaccines maybe they had too much mercury. Over the years, it was quite disproven.

And the star of the story is a doctor in America named Paul Offit in Pennsylvania, who has a new book out by the way. You might have him on the show about this. There is just not a lot of evidence years and years in that there is a connection between the sad state of autism and vaccines, and yet the moms and dads keep taking it up.

PREWITT: Aren't kids supposed to be vaccinated before they go to school?

SHLAES: Well, yes, the state of California and the other states are co-dependent, co-guilty in this because they issue waivers to parents who make a big civil rights case about it, as if it were a school prayer or something. It's no analogous and the schools - now California, after these sad deaths, has made it harder to get in without vaccines.

KEENE: That's whooping cough. I had a friend of the family who got whooping cough through no irresponsibility of his parents. And I remember how serious it was. He recovered. He is playing pro sports right now.

But which is the disease that we are most at risk of floating out? I think of 'Microbes and Man,' the classic book I studied in school. We think of dysentery, cholera, whooping cough, measles, on and on, not the drama of small pox. Which is the one that is floating out there that is of greatest concern?

SHLAES: Well, it is not the most fatal, but it floats a lot, that is mumps, especially when you have a tight community, say a summer camp or a school that is very close together, and we had a mumps outbreak in this area again due to a child who was overseas, came back, imported it to the United States, was in close community.

Some of these vaccines do not confer entire immunity all of them, and some are only somewhat good. That is better than nothing. It is enough to create a community that is disease free. But even kids who have been vaccinated can get some of the diseases, even adults, so you want to have as clean a community as possible.

Remember here we are talking not just about people who don't opt to vaccinate. If you are having chemotherapy, if you are a newborn infant, you count on your community to be free of this disease because you have no protection. It's a few months before infants can get some of these shots, and in that time, they are counting on what they get from their mother, what came in their blood, and the goodwill of their community.

PREWITT: What should I - how worried should I be as an adult of catching something because of this?

SHLAES: I would not be too worried at the current moment. What is disconcerting is the self importance of parents. That is what I tried to get at in this column. Parenting is a hard job. Many of us have done it. It overcomes you and you get strong ideas when you are a parent about what's what. At times you go a little crazy.

This is an example of people going a little crazy. It is a kind of nimbyism, not in my backyard, not for my baby, I don't want a jab because there is a one in a million chance something bad might happen to them. So the best way you can prevent is to have more enlightenment in our communities to talk about really that this is a logical situation with trade offs. It is a trade off you don't want to make.

PREWITT: So again, after 12 years, this study was retracted by the Lancet, but word has not gotten around yet.

SHLAES: Well, word has gotten around, but word has not penetrated and you want to ask why hasn't word - and I think it is because communities talk to each other. If you do not like the idea of your baby getting a shot and you talk to another mother who doesn't either, the two of you build a little community over the coffee.

KEENE: Right.

SHLAES: And we know how that is. It is just like - you know, a lot of things we do, we do because of our affinity group.

KEENE: I just put this out, folks, on Twitter and Facebook, the book that Amity mentions, Paul A. Offit, 'Autism's False Prophets.' You mentioned your immense sympathy that any parent has over this horrendous illness. I think of Mr. Wright's efforts at General Electric on autism.

How prevalent is this? If we were to go into any of our listening communities, if there is a hundred households, is it one or two not vaccinating?

SHLAES: Well, it depends. In the fancier zip codes, not vaccinating is more frequent and you think, oh, poor people wouldn't know so they wouldn't do this. But what is interesting is the Medicaid community has a better rate of vaccination than the non-Medicaid community, which is a tribute to the Medicaid community.

It is more a fancy pants thing to do, that is why it is Marin County. It is popular in Oregon. And Dr. Offit found whole classrooms of children in isolated, upper class pockets where the kids were not vaccinated. In California, I think in Marin County, it was seven percent of kindergartners were not vaccinated. So it is possible in fancy places, I don't want to get down into the details, -

KEENE: Sure, of course.

SHLAES: - the health authorities in California will know that and they are already changing the law there.

KEENE: Oh, they are changing the law now.

SHLAES: Governor -

KEENE: Well, let's come back. Amity, we've got to go to the news here, but let's come back. I want to continue this discussion. Amity Shlaes with us. I just sent out on Twitter and Facebook, 'Autism's False Prophets,' also Ms. Shlaes' column on vaccinations.

9:15

(BREAK)

9:21

KEENE: Amity Shlaes with us. I just put out on Twitter and Facebook her column and her book by Paul Offit pushing against the anti-vaccination crew.

Amity, you mentioned California is starting to react against this. Politicians want to make people happy, but if you get a whole doctor's office of measles or mumps, that is a lot of unhappy people. How are politicians reacting to this debate?

KEENE: Well, they are beginning to think it through, and they probably should think it through pretty fast because as we talked about before just one or two people entering a population changes the whole statistics of it. They are vectors for disease. They are Typhoid Marys. And suddenly a lot of people geometrically can become ill.

We were talking about whooping cough and California's decision now to be sure that everyone has boosters or shots when they go to middle and high school. That seems very important.

But I am also interested - we are all interested in parental consciousness, what makes a mother or father decide not to vaccinate. Maybe they don't remember the past, Tom. Maybe they don't remember what -

KEENE: Well, Ken, you were talking about it, as a fossil in this room - I love saying that - I vaguely remember. But you said people wouldn't go down (inaudible).

PREWITT: Yes, when I was a little kid my mother and the other mothers were just - it was not quite hysteria, but you get a couple of cases of polio, -

KEENE: Yes.

PREWITT: - and you were warned, for example, not to play around a particular creek because the water was polluted and that is how you got polio. It was bordering on hysteria, it really was.

SHLAES: You didn't go to swimming pools -

PREWITT: Yes.

SHLAES: - and both Tom's father and my father had polio and they were - my father was lucky and I think Tom's was, too, because -

KEENE: Yes, yes.

SHLAES: - they could walk afterwards.

PREWITT: Unlike President Roosevelt, for example.

SHLAES: Unlike President Roosevelt.

KEENE: Yes, give us one more idea, Amity, in the minute that we've got left with you. What has been the response of your column? How much hate mail have you gotten?

SHLAES: Plenty of hate mail. Well, you know, especially if you have a child with a malady. I've been hearing from parents of autistic children, very sad, long term challenging problem.

KEENE: Right.

SHLAES: I know the vaccine causes, but they cannot know and the data just don't bear it out. So we want to help parents of autistic children. We want to help autistic children. But we want to dispel this idea. There is logic here, folks. We know the reality, the data are here.

his is not an emotional issue. This is a factual issue. You want to protect your child, protect your friends, protect your population.

KEENE: Amity, thank you so much, always controversial and thought provoking.

9:24

***END OF TRANSCRIPT***

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