Vaccines: Not So Risky a Business After All

Let's start with the basics- you're all (hopefully) familiar with the name Andrew Wakefield by now- best known for collaborating on an article in the Lancet in 1998 condemning the MMR vaccine for causing autism.

This Scientific American blog post by David Ropeik (Harvard Extension School instructor, author of several risk-studies books and consultant on risk perception) looks at how Wakefield's "work" (referred to in quotation marks because of its obvious illegitimacy) has affected the perceived risk of vaccines. He talks about how humans perceive risk, and states the overall lesson of the article as: "sometimes what we do to protect ourselves feels safe, but makes things worse"- an example of which being the reluctance to ride a roller coaster for the first time. Until one can accurately assess the actual risk in a situation, one operates off of a mental model of perceived risk, which can cause an individual to act in what seems to be a less rational way in a situation so long as their perceived risk is higher than actual risk.

So, how does perceived risk come to exist as higher than actual risk? For starters, Ropeik mentions several factors that help determine risk:
"•We know that human-made risks are scarier than those that are natural. Vaccines are human-made.
• We know that a risk will seem more threatening if it comes with little benefit, and vaccines protect us from diseases that are mostly gone (thanks to the vaccines), so their benefits are perceived as minimal (even though the risk remains).
• We know that a risk imposed on us feels scarier than one we choose to take on our own, and vaccination is imposed by government (though one can opt out).
• We are more afraid if we don’t trust the people in charge of our health and safety, and many people don’t trust vaccine makers or the government health agencies overseeing vaccine programs.
• Finally, we know that any risk to kids evokes more fear than the same risk to adults, and the whole fear of vaccines movement got started, and still largely focuses on, autistic children."

Essentially what he's saying is that all the vaccine controversy needed to get itself started was Wakefield's ridiculous allegations; however, once that spark occurred, it snowballed into something much bigger. The problem currently being faced is, as you know, that herd immunity is decreasing and the diseases certain vaccines prevent are coming back; thus, the action based on perceived risk for children is causing a far worse situation to develop (although not much is worse than a few kids being Autistic. I'm kidding).

So, how does the perceived risk level decrease? I would say that it doesn't need to decrease at all; however, there needs to be a shift in what sort of risk is being perceived. If the Concerned Public was more worried about their child's increasing chance of catching Polio (rather than their child's incredibly low chance of being Autistic, which arguably isn't that bad), more voluntary vaccinations would take place and as a result our herd immunity would begin to return. After the perceived-risk-shift, too, there would be much less resistance to the scientific studies that disprove the vaccine—autism link (i.e, all of them) and that nasty little Wakefield problem would go away; everyone wins. Except the Polio.

-Ian