Chelsea Whyte in NewScientist (1 April 2017 – sheesh, how did I miss this?) reports how the anti-vaccination crowd has had a tangible impact on public health, by suppressing the manufacture of a vaccine for Lyme Disease:
The best approach would be to vaccinate people at risk – but there is currently no vaccine. We used to have one, but thanks to anti-vaccination activists, that is no longer the case.
In the late 1990s, a race was on to make the first Lyme disease vaccine. By December 1998, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the release of Lymerix, developed by SmithKline Beecham, now GSK. But the company voluntarily withdrew the drug after only four years.
This followed a series of lawsuits – including one where recipients claimed Lymerix caused chronic arthritis. Influenced by now-discredited research purporting to show a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, activists raised the question of whether the Lyme disease vaccine could cause arthritis.
Media coverage and the anti-Lyme-vaccination groups gave a voice to those who believed their pain was due to the vaccine, and public support for the vaccine declined. “The chronic arthritis was not associated with Lyme,” says Stanley Plotkin, an adviser to pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur. “When you’re dealing with adults, all kinds of things happen to them. They get arthritis, they get strokes, heart attacks. So unless you have a control group, you’re in la-la land.”
But there was a control group – the rest of the US population. And when the FDA reviewed the vaccine’s adverse event reports in a retrospective study, they found only 905 reports for 1.4 million doses. Still, the damage was done, and the vaccine was benched.
I’ve had Lyme disease. I was diagnosed three or four days before my wedding. The UC doc took a close look at this big red bar across my groin and said, Oh, yeah, that’s Lyme disease – we’ve been diagnosing this for a couple of years down here [in the Twin Cities] now. Go get some doxycycline.
And I was lucky. A big, visible symptom and a doc who recognized it immediately.
But this is a dangerous disease if not caught early, and it makes me a little bitter that a bunch of amateurs, a bunch of yahoos, let themselves be led around by their ignorance and panic and managed to ground an important vaccine. Granted, there are five strains of Lyme disease and Lymerix only works for one of them, but still, this is unacceptable.
Kevin Drum, who pointed at this article, remarks:
All of you who have had Lyme disease should know this. You could have avoided it if not for the ravings of the anti-vax nitwits and the gullibility of the mainstream TV talkers who give them a platform. It’s long past time to put an end to this idiocy.
Amen. And a new vaccine is in development for all five variants.
I will also tie this to the DTCA (Direct To Consumer Advertising, wherein pharmaceutical companies make commercials to market drugs to consumers) idiocy, because the direct appeal to consumers by drug makers makes the consumer think they have some sort of inherent expertise in the evaluation of drugs & therapies, which in turn contributes to the current amateur hour in the White House and across the nation – not to mention inflating costs for Big Pharma. Without that encouragement, perhaps we’d have consumers who would just not engage in this damn bit of silliness – or could be told to go get some education in biology and statistics before shooting their damn mouths off.
Oh, and just for a little kick in the teeth, the article notes that climate change is greatly increasing the effective range of Lyme Disease. Here’s an effective time series map for the United States, provided by NewScientist, illustrating the change:
Gah. This leaves a bad, bad taste in my mouth.
