The Checkup: Busting popular misconceptions around childhood vaccinations

Some say vaccines are a victim of their own success.

Because vaccines have been so effective at eradicating some of the most dangerous diseases, most of us have actually never experienced what it is like to live in a world where you can contract diseases like measles at the grocery store or where your child can get polio and be paralyzed.

It’s a radically different world than we know right now. And it’s sometimes hard to comprehend that, especially with a lot of misconceptions about vaccines floating around. In fact, some vaccine experts say push back against vaccines is at its highest.

Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also shows that childhood vaccinations are at their lowest point in a long time, while vaccine exemptions are at their highest –– most for religious or philosophical reasons, not medical reasons.

This episode from The Checkup addresses some of the most popular questions and misconceptions about vaccines.

Lizzy McGrevy, host of The Checkup, talks to Managing Editor Farah Yousry about that.

This transcript has been edited for length, style and clarity.

Lizzy McGrevy: We're going to cover some heavy topics today, such as vaccination. So I was thinking we could gamify this episode a little bit and have our first ever game of ‘True or false, The Checkup edition.’ So, I'm going to state a claim, and you are going to say whether that claim is true or false, and then give us an explanation with science and data to back it up. Sounds good? 

Farah Yousry: Yes.

McGrevy: The first claim – vaccines cause autism.

Yousry: So, in the late 90s a British doctor called Andrew Wakefield made the claim that the combination of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine – also known as the MMR vaccine – caused autism. To “prove” it, he published a case series of children, eight of whom developed autism within a month of getting the vaccine. That was it.

This study was discredited and retracted. And, really it did not support the claim that vaccines cause autism and did not prove any cause and effect relation whatsoever – just mere association.

Dr. Robert Frenck, one of the country’s top vaccine experts and the director of the Center for Vaccine Research at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, said by virtue of how many children got the measles vaccine around the world, the vaccine can really be associated with nearly anything.

“Over 90% of kids got the measles vaccine. So, the measles vaccine is going to be associated with everything, right? Because everybody got it. So, you could say measles vaccine is associated with you eating breakfast tomorrow morning. Because you got a measles vaccine, you ate breakfast,” Frenck said.

So, the only way to scientifically establish cause and effect and to test that claim is to look at large numbers of children who either did or didn’t get that vaccine and make sure you control for things like socioeconomic background, medical background, so that you can isolate the effect of that one variable, which is getting the MMR vaccine.

“When we did that study –– and it's been done 18 times, in seven countries on three continents, involving hundreds of thousands of children and costing tens of millions of dollars –– you are not at greater risk of getting autism if you got that vaccine or not,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a leading expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But I just think that it's hard to unring the bell. Once you've raised a safety concern, it's very hard to make it go away, especially for a disorder like autism, [because] there isn't a clear cause, there isn't a clear cure. So, you're looking for something.”

McGrevy: Fascinating. Next claim –– true or false, diseases like measles or polio are not even in the U.S. anymore, so it's unnecessary to vaccinate my child against them.

Yousry: False and this is an interesting one. So, those diseases are nearly gone from the U.S. But it would be a stretch to say they do not exist in the U.S. anymore.

In fact, as recently as two years ago, there was a polio case in New Jersey. And we hear about measles outbreaks in schools in several states all the time.

Bottom line is, you can travel almost anywhere in the world and be back in under 24 hours. So, some of these diseases are still out there in the world and they can very easily be brought back into the U.S. So, being vaccinated is still necessary and protects you from some horrible diseases.

McGrevy: Here's the next claim. I am at my doctor's office and they're asking me to give my child multiple shots at the same time. Surely my child's system will be overloaded, right?

Yousry: That’s a good one. And it’s not true.

The number of antigens that multiple vaccines introduce to the body is extremely minimal compared to the number of antigens that children are exposed to since the day they are born.

“A single bacterium has about 3000 immunological components and we’re colonized with trillions of them. If we couldn't survive the immunological challenge of vaccines, we wouldn't survive as a species,” Offit said. “I mean, vaccines are literally, not figuratively, literally, a drop in the ocean of what we encounter and manage every day.”

(To learn more about getting multiple vaccines and combining vaccines, you can check this information out from Cleveland Clinic. Also, be sure to talk to your doctor about any concerns.)

McGrevy: True or false, herd immunity and natural immunity are just as effective, or even more effective than vaccines. 

Yousry: Lizzy, let me ask you this – how do you get herd immunity or natural immunity?

McGrevy: I'm going to guess, by getting infected by the disease?

Yousry: Exactly. So, it kind of becomes like Russian roulette. You’re rolling the dice and hoping that if your child gets the disease, their body is going to survive it and not suffer severe short- or long-term damage or even death. One way experts say you can think about vaccines is kind of like a software update to your cell phone –– it helps your child’s immune system stay updated to be able to fight germs.

So, one example Dr. Offit gave me is measles. If you’re infected with measles, measles will reproduce itself in your body thousands and thousands of times and can cause horrible problems up to death. Now, when you get the vaccine, which is a weakened version of measles, it will only reproduce itself 10, 15 or 20 times in your body and then stop. So, you only get to experience minor side effects several days later.

McGrevy: Thank you so much for this valuable information, Farah.

If you have a question about our complex medical system or any health care related issues you’d like to know more about, you can reach out to The Checkup and Side Effects Public Media at news@wfyi.org.

Side Effects Public Media is a health reporting collaboration based at WFYI in Indianapolis. We partner with NPR stations across the Midwest and surrounding areas — including KBIA and KCUR in Missouri, Iowa Public Radio, Ideastream in Ohio, KOSU in Oklahoma and WFPL in Kentucky.