McFreedom

Reuters is reporting on the "comeback" of whooping cough - but completely misses the forest for the trees. Reading the article, we learn that "the culprit seems to be weakening effects of the shot." They quote Dr. David Hooper from Harvard Medical School: "We have a vaccine for it, but the problem with the vaccine is that immunity wanes after five years," and the solution apparently recommended is that teenagers need to get a booster shot.

Later in the article, they note that the Pertussis bacteria aren't changing their pathological characteristics under evolutionary pressure from the vaccine: ""It seems that 40 years of vaccination did not change the pathogenicity," they quote Nicole Guiso, the chief of the National Center for Infectious Disease at the Institut Pasteur in Paris as saying. However, "incidents [have been] steadily increasing since the 1980s."

Hmmm...the germ hasn't "evolved" in response to the vaccination. Yet, the incidents have been steadily increasing. Didn't the children getting vaccinated thirty years ago also have a weakening effect as they moved into their teenage years? Then why is this a growing problem now, if the vaccine is the same and the orgranism is the same? They do skim past the answer, quoted from the CDC, in the article, but miss its significance: "Most deaths occur among unvaccinated children or children too young to be vaccinated." And there are a lot more unvaccinated children, these days, now that not vaccinating your kids is trendy in some circles. So, it seems, the solution isn't to vaccinate the children at risk, but rather to get boosters for the teenage children of the parents who are civic-minded enough to vaccinate their children.

Now, of course, these articles are only as good as the experts they quote, and perhaps the experts at this conference didn't do a good job explaining the issue to the Reuters reporter. That said, it would be nice to have reporters that could use critical thinking to say, "These guys say nothing has changed in the past forty years, yet rates are on the rise - clearly there's some issue missing, here."