The Anti-Vaccine Movement: Blinding Us With Pseudoscience

Despite the American infatuation with gambling, in other areas of life we shy away from random chance. We like cause and effect. We like the story of one thing leading to another in a nice, straight line. And if such a story does not declare itself, we'll invent one.

Our need for a clear, predictable pattern leads us down the wayward path of conspiracy theories. In the absence of a cause that makes sense to us, we'll spend hours, days, years looking for one.

Why? Peter Jennings alluded to a possible reason in his thorough 2003 documentary "Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy." In his conclusion Jennings said, "When you put a misfit like Oswald on one side of a scale and Kennedy on the other, it doesn't balance. But put a big conspiracy on one side...and it does."

Peter Jennings had reams of evidence to back him up, but of course the conspiracy theorists didn't care. Cold, hard proof is a poor match against the emotions surrounding cults and dubious conspiracies.

Another controversy that's still kicking around, in defiance of evidence to the contrary, is vaccines and their alleged link to autism. In March a federal court ruled the link does not exist, but this debate continues to simmer, reflecting the tension between those who view vaccination as unnatural and those who insist that it is an essential weapon in protecting public health.

Even if you think vaccines have nothing at all to do with you, I urge everyone to go to the PBS website for the recent Frontline program "The Vaccine War" and advance the video to 14:13 (chapter 2). Watch as a six-week-old baby in Portland, Ore., struggles to breathe. She has whooping cough. The original source of infection was a high school student who had never been vaccinated.

The baby's name is Vanessa, and she was one week away from getting her DPT (diphtheria - pertussis - tetanus) vaccine. Dr. Cynthia Cristofani manages to save Vanessa's life, but just barely. Now Dr. Cristofani shows the footage of baby Vanessa to medical students so they'll know what whooping cough looks like.

Future doctors will need to know. Whooping cough is making a comeback. In 2010, California alone reported 900 cases and five deaths. All five were children under three months of age. Click play below to watch an ABC News video report:

In South Bend, Indiana, a 38-day-old baby named Callie recently died.

Treating whooping cough is difficult because even though it is considered a bacterial infection, the inflammation persists longer than the infection, [Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chief of pediatric infectious disease at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital] said. Antibiotics are effective if whooping cough is detected early, she said. However, oftentimes many weeks may pass before the symptoms distinguish the child's whooping cough from a cold. "That makes it days and weeks that the child has whooping cough and it is too late for antibiotics," Maldonado said.

Some say disease is "natural" and might even good for our immune systems.

Tell that to my grandmother, who survived pertussis in childhood and lived to a ripe old age, but suffered from a hacking cough all her adult life. Tell it to my mom, who caught diphtheria when she was eight years old. The doctor said if they'd waited another day before calling him, she would have died. My mother was bedridden for a year. My great-aunt died of malaria, and the family moved from humid southeastern Texas to the dry panhandle.

The 1918 flu pandemic taught everyone some lessons about infectious disease. The first wave of the flu, in March, behaved as expected, attacking the young, old and infirm. The second wave was another matter. By August the virus had mutated into a deadlier form. This time the disease killed healthy people in the prime of life, aged 20 to 40. Patients hemorrhaged from the ears, nose and lung. Some died within hours of the onset of symptoms.

In the end, the flu pandemic lasted two years and killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, or 3 to 6 percent of earth's population.

Yes, disease is natural. But so is arsenic. So was childhood mortality in the 19th century. As recently as the 1930s, almost 11 percent of American children died before the age of 20. Now the figure is 1.3 percent.

Interviews with parents, researchers and doctors in "The Vaccine War" reveal a stark divide. Some see vaccines as a public health issue. Others see them as a lifestyle choice.

In 2009, Oregon mom Jennifer Margulis wrote about the vaccine debate and her own experience 10 years prior with her newborn daughter. On Frontline, Margulis says, "Pediatricians need to listen. They don't need to say do it my way or take a walk. They need to say how can I accommodate you so that we can both get our needs met in this situation."

Get our needs met? This isn't a friendship. We're talking about public health. The public's viewpoint is clear and firm: Don't infect us. Don't kill us.

Margulis, who approached this topic with a few scientific credentials of her own, defended her position after the Frontline show aired. "Of Mainstream Media, Hate Mail and Vaccines," published on mothering.com, clarifies that she is not against all vaccines. She is in favor of selective vaccination.

The vaccine war is making for some strange bedfellows. The movement sprung from the place where the left and the right intersect on the outer fringe. The ultra-religious, anti-government home schoolers have joined hands with the holistic tree-huggers and declared: Not with my kid, you don't!

On one side we have Generation Rescue, which benefits from the glam-quotient of former Playboy centerfold Jenny McCarthy, whose son was diagnosed with autism in 2005 (although some suspect he has Landau–Kleffner syndrome, which can be misdiagnosed as autism).

Prior to her public announcement about her son's condition, she had claimed he was a "crystal child" and she was an "indigo mom." (That means they have special powers. Needless to say, Ms. McCarthy would not be my first choice as a source of medical knowledge.)

There are other anti-vaccine websites, like the National Vaccine Information Center. Squaring off against them is vaccinateyourbaby.org, which boasts the star power of actress Amanda Peet (take that, Jenny).

Peet stands with thousands of doctors and scientists, along with Alison Singer, a former executive of Autism Speaks. Singer did a 180. Last year she resigned from the organization, and advised it look elsewhere for answers because "looking where we know the answer isn't is one less dollar we have to spend where we might find new answers. The fact is that vaccines save lives. They don't cause autism."

Looks like Autism Speaks apparently came around.

While we, as health care consumers, can and should do our own research online, we may not have the education or experience to separate the wheat from the chaff. On the Internet there's an awful lot of both.

Ethics writer Terry Newell worries about our growing tendency to become our own experts.

We will too often substitute ignorance for insight. Science will become irrelevant and we'll be left with only our own value preferences. A society that argues solely on the basis of values will soon find itself in conversations in which the majority will see little reason to listen to anyone else. Science is one of the few tools we have to confront majority opinion. The framers of our Constitution worried about the tyranny of the majority. We need to be equally worried.

I am.