Practicing pediatrics in California, where the measles outbreak occurred at Disneyland in December, has been an interesting experience. Suddenly, families are calling in a panic, wondering if their kids have had the vaccine, if they need the second one, if they should go to Disneyland with their infant or at all. This also seemed to me the perfect opportunity to again broach the benefit of vaccines with one of the few nonvaccinating families in my practice.
“So, has this measles outbreak made you reconsider vaccinating the kids with the MMR vaccine?” I asked my patient’s mother. “Actually, it has reinforced my beliefs,” she replied. “How is that?” I questioned. “Well, the more I read the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports, the more I realize that more people actually have died from the MMR vaccine than from measles in the past 10 years.” Having not reviewed the VAERS reports myself, I could not really argue intelligently, so I replied, “I’m not aware of that being true, and I will have to review the information and get back to you.”
The following is my response to her.
Dear nonvaccinating parent,
I wanted to follow up our discussion about immunizations from your visit last week. As a physician, my first duty to my patients is to first, do no harm. When you expressed your concerns regarding the VAERS data and said how more deaths were occurring from immunizations than from the measles virus itself, I felt a need to further investigate.
I reviewed the information, specifically deaths reported that were associated with the MMR vaccine on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention VAERS website (wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html). As you are aware, this site has been open since June of 1990 and everyone, health providers as well as parents, can report an adverse event following any vaccine at any point in time. The report yielded 65 events with regards to death and MMR vaccine over the past 25 years. Of the 65 reports, 4 of them were repeat reports of the same person, 18 had other causes that could explain death aside from the vaccine, such as leukemia diagnosed the same day, and some were associated with the vaccine, but no direct cause.
The death rate from measles has declined in recent years. According to the CDC web site, prior to the vaccine being available in 1963, in the United States alone, there were 500 deaths per year and some 4,000 cases of encephalitis. In the year 2000, the United States eliminated measles from the country (no cases in over 12 months). The last documented death from measles in the United States was in 2005, according to the CDC. This is in large part due to our vaccination rates. Worldwide, according to the World Health Organization web site, there were still 145,700 deaths in 2013.
It is interesting to me how two people can look at the same data and come to such different conclusions. You see the deaths reported on VAERS as so many deaths caused by the vaccine, and I see how many lives have been saved by vaccinating. According to the CDC data, about 85% of children are being immunized. We can extrapolate that at least 85 million children have been vaccinated in the past 25 years, and only 65 deaths have been reported to VAERS. So the death rate from measles is 1/500 and the death rate from vaccines is 1/1,000,000.
You also must keep in mind that as more and more people choose not to vaccinate, the benefit of the herd immunity your children are experiencing right now will be lost and the rate of deaths will climb again.
Sincerely,
Nazzi Mojibi, M.D.
Dr. Mojibi practices pediatrics in Fresno, Calif. She said that she had no relevant financial disclosures. E-mail her at pdnews@frontlinemedcom.com.
