A flu shot won't make Ebola go away, but it might kill our anti-doctor hysteria

Last month, I became a father for the first time, and with parenting has come a slew of unanticipated responsibilities. Did you know that you have to shop for a pediatrician? I had hoped someone looked at Google Maps and assigned the one closest to you. (They don’t.)

So with a new baby in hand and Ebola and annual flu shots in the news, I found myself asking a bunch of unfamiliar baby doctors a question I never thought I’d have to ask a medical professional: “How do you feel about vaccines?”

My first prospective doctor looked at me, bit her lip and squirmed, so I bailed her out and said, “Look, don’t get me wrong: herd immunity is extremely my shit.” She visibly relaxed then because conversations like that – and about Ebola – often turn rapidly and radically in the opposite direction.

Take this guy, who is a children’s allergy specialist in Ohio:

— Dr. Dave Stukus (@AllergyKidsDoc) November 4, 2014

Actual discussion: Parent "I want #Ebola vaccine for my child" Doc "There isn't one, but we have #flushot" Parent "We don't believe in that"

This is the state of our science conversation: hyped non-dangers, self-created unnecessary dangers, being wrong about the facts both coming and going. Polls still suggest that Ebola is a greater threat and that the authorities are deliberately doing less than they can to fight it; meanwhile, the measles have reached a 20-year high and parents are saying, Screw it, let’s roll the dice on Madison and Tyler getting some – at least it’ll be something to write about in that 17-page brick of a Christmas form letter we’ll send out printed in Comic Sans.

So where does this sentiment come from? I wanted to talk to Dr David Stukus about that tweet, but his hospital said he would be “out of the office for another week”. I assume that means that he’s currently locked in a room, covered in runic quotes from the US Constitution written in blood and being beaten with rolled-up copies of the 10th Amendment.

I assume that mostly because I spent a lot of time in 2007 and 2008 deprogramming friends who got really into Ron Paul For President.

Paul’s quixotic 2008 campaign was so busy trying to get any money or help it could that it didn’t make much effort to “lose” friends, even if those friends included the founder of America’s No1 white supremacist website (and anyone jazzed by Paul’s newsletters). One group the campaign also strongly attracted were people fired up about Paul’s pledge to end the Food and Drug Administration – the sorts of people who are angry that they couldn’t buy colloidal silver from Walgreen’s to stop all infections (even though it’s more likely to get you Smurfed than cure Ebola).

A lot of the anti-FDA enthusiasts came to the cause via recycled paleoconservative arguments in newsletters from the John Birch Society and others, which appeared in your mailbox in a plain brown package for most of the 20th century. (Try searching “vaccines” and “New World Order” and just melt your own brain.) Apparently, the FDA and public-health policies in general are just means of population control, and Nanny Big Brother uses health anxieties as a vector for increased statism and interference in your life – whether through overt mind control or an assault on the 10th amendment and states’ rights to say, “We’re Team Rubella and Edward!”. Clinton R Miller – a John Bircher and “lobbyist for naturopaths” – not only challenged fluoridation in water but also Lyndon Johnson’s vaccination program by way of a disingenuous appeal to skepticism (which has since metastasized into “I’m just asking questions”) and big-gummymint bugaboos. Such a program, he wrote, “[extended] the concepts of police power, of the state in quarantine far beyond it’s proper limitation”.

But while it’s unsurprising to see goldbugs who have invested in mines advocating for an unregulated market of heavy-metal curative beverages, or for people who hate regulation to decry government-mandated programs funnelling guaranteed money to a few large corporations via a gamed market, what is sort of surprising is seeing liberals adopting the same rhetoric as conservative libertarians.

Plenty of good lefty types have, in the last 15 years, successfully mainstreamed former Bircherite anti-public-health language. Instead of coming to the conclusion that public-health campaigns are propelled by an anti-liberty statist conspiracy, they conclude that there’s just an unholy corporatist motive behind vaccines. Follow the money.

The TV show House, MD blew up that argument midway through its second episode:

HOUSE: Think [vaccines] don’t work?

ANTI-VAXXER MOM: I think some multinational pharmaceutical company wants me to think they work. Pad their bottom line

HOUSE: You know another really good business? Teeny, tiny baby coffins.

But there’s a smug, privileged elitism at work in the liberal dismissal of vaccines, too. When wealthy LA schools have low vaccination rates and interactive maps show outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in high-income areas, it’s easy to see anti-vaxxer ideology as an attack of affluenza. Your kid getting rubella isn’t as big of a deal if you have a Cadillac insurance plan or can pay out of pocket for the consequences. You can ape reactionary right-wing language about public health being a sucker’s game if you consider yourself an elite, above the market, and able to pursue any alternative at your whimsy. You can just ignore the fact that the bogus studies that kicked off the anti-vaccination craze in the late 1990s were helmed by a man paid nearly half a million pounds by trial lawyers looking to game the system and unlock millions in financial penalties from the National Health Service.

There are two prices we will all pay for this ideology, beyond some people looking like idiots. Plenty of people are idiots, and that’s fine; idiots go into the emergency room and demand a shot of antibiotics for the flu, and the price the rest of us pay is having to listen to them at the bar bitching about some smug elitist doctor lecturing them about how antibiotics don’t treat viruses. That’s a hassle, but we can all afford hassles.

The macro price is this: that elites’ smarter-than-thou alterna-medicine shopping and traditional right-wing anti-statist paranoia have made the demagoguery against public health profitable politics on both sides. The sort of harangue that might have been delivered to your mailbox in a brown wrapper in 1955 is Marin County cocktail conversation in 2014. Republicans can insinuate that an African gentleman like Barack Obama might have some interest in bringing an African disease like Ebola to the United States. And Democrats like Kay Hagan and Mark Pryor can decide that – apart from the economic dislocation and absence of medical justification – an anti-Ebola travel ban should be considered. You know who thought that idea was incredibly stupid? Ron Paul.

But the price is on a micro level is that, if you’re me, you go to your own medical appointment (with a guy who likes to argue with you about Obamacare during every appointment) and read Dr Stukus’s tweet to him and then wait seemingly interminably for a laugh that doesn’t come because he kind of agrees:

The thing is, I can see not getting a flu vaccine. I get them, but the real worry is really young children or the elderly. If you get the flu and you aren’t one of those, you’re going to survive it. Whereas I think a lot of people worry about the 1-in-10,000 chance of a side effect like Guillan-Barré. But, if you get Ebola, unless you get advanced therapy from the blood of people who’ve survived infection, you’re not going to survive.

But the CDC, the World Health Organization, everybody says the chances of getting Ebola in the United States are infinitesimal.

Yeah, but you don’t know what they’re not telling you.

And you don’t know if he’s talking about these hypothetical people, or himself, or if he’s kidding or being serious.

Or, worse, you go into different pediatricians’ offices – already feeling scared and overmatched at the prospect of being a parent – and you ask a question about vaccines that feels so stupid that you assume it’ll be taken as a deadpanned joke, and you watch your prospective doctor grow wary. Then, after you reassure her that you like vaccinations, she still explains their clinic’s protocol for handling children of parents who refuse vaccinations, just in case.

And you realize that this is how we live now: beating against a current bearing us ceaselessly back to the preposterous.