Midnight Mutterings | Vaccines

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

The US Senate is currently conducting hearings that will lead to the confirmations (or not) of the selections Donald Trump has chosen for his Cabinet, his closest advisors (other than Elon Musk) for his second term as President of the United States. One of those cabinet selections, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is President Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Human Services, a huge department overseeing almost everything relating to the physical and emotional welfare of everyone in the United States. Although there have been lengthy Senate hearings, as of this writing, Kennedy has not yet been confirmed, though his selection has been approved (along party lines, after a few doubters changed their opinions) by the Senate Finance Committee, a group of 25 senators, to proceed to a vote of the full senate for confirmation as Secretary of HHS.

What does this particular confirmation vote have to do with vaccines? You might well know more about this than I do, but Kennedy has been involved with anti-vaccine groups, and in particular, a group that opposes vaccines on the unsupported view that they may cause autism. He gets a lot more public support for his belief that less ultra-processed food is better, especially for children.

The Health and Human Services Secretary is a general manager who administers and oversees the organization and its programs, which include ten agencies in US health services and three human services agencies. These programs and agencies include the CDC, FDA, NIH as well as Medicare and Medicaid and a number of smaller but important agencies like the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The proposed budget for 2025 includes $130.7 billion in discretionary and $1.7 trillion in mandatory spending. (I don’t even know how many zeros are necessary to write that amount of money.)

Somewhere in all that the issue of vaccines exists. I don’t really know much about vaccines beyond my personal experience. You can look here for a brief  but interesting history of vaccine development by the World Health Organization:

https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination

All I knew before this is that milkmaids exposed to cowpox were immune to smallpox and that smallpox vaccines were developed from cowpox. I have never seen a case of smallpox, but after looking at photos on the internet, I would not hesitate to be vaccinated, had that not already occurred when I was five or six years old. I don’t know how long the immunity lasts, but in the US and most western nations, there is very little chance of being exposed, given the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine.

My experience with pre-vaccine polio is less remote. As a preteen, I knew three adolescent children of family friends who were sick with polio. The older twin boys were quite ill and spent months in ‘iron lungs’ and survived without disabling paralysis. Their younger brother had a milder case and did not require breathing support. During those years, public swimming pools were closed, and there were other restrictions on public gatherings, though not as extreme as with our recent pandemic. Vaccines became widely available for babies and children a decade later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio

‘In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of the nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis.”

In my adult life I have known only a few polio survivors with serious disabilities. One was an adult student in a wheelchair when I taught at Central Washington University in the 1970s. A second was a clinic manager when I worked at Children’s Hospital in Seattle in the eighties, whose legs and one arm were affected, and the third was a neighbor on Orcas with post polio syndrome (described in the Wikipedia article above) who moved to the mainland when his symptoms became too severe for comfortable life here.

Mitch McConnell of the US House of Representatives, who had polio as a very young child, had a fall earlier this week. Whether is was related to post polio syndrome has not been mentioned in reports as far as I know. I do know it is hard for him to listen to debates about vaccines. Two more members of the House had polio as children.

McConnell believes in vaccines. Me, too. I haven’t had any serious illnesses that could have been prevented by vaccines. Not even COVID, which isn’t always prevented by vaccine, though the illness seems to be milder when the person has been vaccinated. I have a friend who nearly lost her job when she refused to be vaccinated for COVID. As she said, she was depending on a healthy immune system given to her by God. I didn’t argue with her about that, knowing she wouldn’t have been convinced by me. However, I did think she wasn’t taking the number of people she might have endangered into consideration had she contracted COVID and passed it on. I don’t know if she watched the media images of makeshift morgues in refrigerated trucks behind hospitals where many people died in the recent COVID pandemic, some of them health care workers who were infected at work.

According to US Facts Websites:

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/

In the US, there have been 99,596,74 cases of COVID and 1,104,000 deaths. And in Washington State: 1,969,833 cases and 15,972 deaths

I’m somehow reminded of a story my sister (with whom I don’t always agree) told me years ago after she returned from travel with our sister-in-law in Rome. It seems they somehow became lost on a dark street one night and were a little worried. According to my sister, our sister-in-law said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to pray for us.’ To which, my sister claims she said, ‘Good. And I’m going to look around while you do.’

So, I’m not so comforted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he declares he is not ‘anti-vaccine,’ when he might be in charge of all of our government health and wellbeing and the staff and money involved. I’d really prefer someone who is pro-vaccine, who looks around. And reads. And listens to experts who know more than he does. Final note about my sister in law: When she was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer, she chose to delay treatment until after her cancer had metastasized. When I talked to her just before she died, she was at peace with her decision and was looking forward to her afterlife experience. I couldn’t be other than happy for her and her choice, especially as her experience didn’t endanger anyone else, given breast cancer isn’t contagious..

I had actually planned to write about vaccines for animals in general and, in particular, animals in our food supply. If you ever read or watched programs based on the books by James Herriot (pen name) English veterinarian, or if you grew up on a ranch or large farm, you would realize that a whole lot of farming is about vaccines. About keeping food animals alive and healthy for their own sake until they become or produce safe food. And now we have bird flu. Apparently, there is a big stockpile of vaccine against bird flu if and when it threatens to become an epidemic in humans. I’m not clear about whether there is a vaccine for bird flu for chickens, or it is in case wild birds are endangering humans. What I think I understand is why eggs are so expensive now, whereas chicken meat is not. It is because it taakes many more months for a chicken to reach egg laying age than broiler age. So a broiler facility can replace a ‘crop’ of chickens much quicker than an egg laying chicken facility if the facility has a bird flu outbreak and chickens have to be slaughtered.

Apparently, my point here is that I would prefer an HHS Secretary who had at least some health and/or science background and believes in the value of vaccine as well as good nutrition. (And maybe a president who believes in both.)