The Anti-Vaccination Nation

(an advocacy piece republished from here, where I’m sure no one read it…)

There’s a reason why the unfortunate children of Marin County, California have the highest rates of whooping cough infection in the entire state—more than the low-income, rural counties of the Central Valley, and much more than sprawling, urban Los Angeles. The well-heeled, overwhelmingly liberal, and otherwise well-educated parents in the North Bay simply believe they know something the entire medical establishment and about fifty years of public health policy overlooked. And it’s a claim that holds increasing credence for a number of hip young parents all over America just like them. Those measly shots required for children after birth or before attending kindergarten? Rather than time-tested, safe, and effective shields against contagious infection, the boosters are chock full of “strange chemicals” not to be trusted, some of which, a minority will insist, can even cause autism.

It’s a fascinating claim to make, and almost tailored to grab headlines, although less so for the belief’s novelty than for its impact on the health of such misguided parents’ vulnerable children. Vaccinations, of course, do not cause autism, nor did they ever; but forgoing them unequivocally correlates with contracting the horrible things they are proven to prevent. Things like whooping cough, for example, an infection so named for the sound a child makes as it struggles to breath after a coughing attack.

The claims did not come from the blue. Twelve years ago, the highly-venerated medical journal The Lancet published a study suggesting a link between routine vaccinations and increased incidents of autism. The report dealt specifically with a mercury-containing preservative found in the common MMR vaccine, but the study was a bombshell, and it set off the small, but increasingly influential wave of concern about harmful side effects from vaccinations.

This past February however, The Lancet, and all but one of the study’s original authors, categorically retracted the original study—after an already partial retraction in 2004—not only finding no plausible link between vaccines and autism, but also a number of scientific and ethical errors in the original report. Twelve years post-facto, this seems to matter little. Millions of spooked parents like those in Marin—hyped up by Fox News-style facts via the Internet—refuse routine vaccinations for their children. “It’s very easy to scare people; it’s very hard to unscare them,” noted Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in the Wall Street Journal.

And so it goes that a March 2010 study found that one in four parents believed that some vaccines cause autism, while one in eight refused at least one recommended vaccination. In California, that kind of belief is enough to exempt a parent’s child from getting an otherwise required vaccination—an allowance that essentially allows the hapless notions of a few to dictate public health policy for an entire classroom, school, or county.

In a typical school—let’s say, in a district that requires all students to have certain vaccinations before enrollment—it takes about 90 percent of children to be immunized for any type of vaccine to be effective. That leaves a healthy margin for a few religious exemptions—Christian Scientists, I’m looking at you—and the like. But last year at an elementary school in Alameda, California, 30 percent of kindergartners didn’t get the whooping cough, or pertussis, vaccine. In the well-off Piedmont neighborhood of Oakland, all three public elementary schools had immunization rates of 89 percent or less. And south of San Francisco in the affluent Silicon Valley suburb of Atherton, parents of 29 of the 86 new kindergarteners—34 percent of the class—opted out. Unsurprisingly, a recent WSJ article noted that Bay Area cases of the debilitating cough were up almost sixfold to 173 compared with the same period in 2009. Throughout the entire state, the number of cases rose fourfold to 910. That’s right. Infections from whooping cough. When was the last time you heard that one?

Before a vaccine was invented invented for it in the 1930s, pertussis killed 5,000 to 10,000 people a year. These days, thanks to sound public health policy, in a normal year that number hovers around thirty. But if you refuse kids the shot, those Bay Area whooping cough numbers make perfect, frustrating, confounding, statistical, scientific sense.

This little guy has whooping cough.

So why would parents knowingly do this—expose not just their children to the risk of infection, but even the children of those who followed the science and got a few shots? Part of the answer, of course, is an age-old and simple nugget of truth. “People are generally compelled by their fears,” said Dr. Paul Offit, in a New York Times article. “And since you don’t see vaccine-preventable diseases anymore, like polio, you don’t have a fear of it. [You're] scared of measles vaccine but not scared of measles.” Those lucky enough to have grown up in the developed world have become so removed from the virulent world of disease and infection that they’ve forgotten how serious and deadly it can be.

Paralytic polio used to strike 16,000 people a year. Now that’s virtually zero. Between 1964 and 1965, 20,000 newborn infants had congenital rubella syndrome, causing heart defects, deafness, and retardation. These days, there’s only a handful. In the 1930s, the United States had roughly 30,000 cases of diphtheria per year, and in 1921, the infection killed 15,520 people. Fast forward to the turn of the millennium: one death.

There’s a reason these afflictions sound foreign and downright old-fashioned. It’s because they are.

Between the 1920s and 1960s, as vaccines became available, national, state, and school district governments put a priority on the safety and health of their citizens, and in doing so, created one the first forms of universal and preventative health care. (If President Obama had a hard enough time passing recent health reform, I shudder to think of him having to champion mandatory vaccination laws anew.) In fact, thanks to a few routine shots, American families aren’t compelled to have seven, nine, or even eleven children anymore. The two or three that do come along will most likely survive.

But with fewer children, it’s no wonder that parents place a higher priority on the well-being of each individual one. That is generally a very good thing. But mixed with the pseudo-science of anti-vaccination ideology, it can be downright dangerous. So-called “exposure parties” are a frightening example. You’ve heard the idea, perhaps been privy to it: a kid gets chickenpox, and the moms all get together and expose their children at the same time. It’s convenient. Gets the thing out of the way. But it turns out that, whoops, chickenpox can kill. In fact, before there was a vaccine against it, the pox killed about 100 people annually. I suppose that’s not a lot considering how many kids weather the virus’ scabs and scratching without any ill affect, but why take a risk if you don’t have to?

The bottom line is that there are some fourteen vaccinations available for children and adults. Get them. All of them.

There’s a notion out there that all the vaccinations we give to children just seems like too much. It’s not too much. When you enter the birth canal and are born, you’re no longer in a sterile environment. Very quickly you have bacteria living on your skin, in your nose and throat. There are trillions of them that live on the surface of your body. One bacterium has 2,000 to 6,000 proteins. If you take all 14 vaccines that kids get, it’s probably 150 immunological components or proteins. It’s not just figuratively a drop in the ocean of what you manage every day—it’s literally a drop in the ocean. The notion of delaying vaccines, withholding them or shifting them around, or having fewer boosters, because it’s too much of a challenge goes against everything one knows about the way your immune system works. People are reticent to give a newborn the hepatitis B vaccine and often delay it. Hepatitis B vaccine is one protein. If you can’t handle that vaccine as a newborn, you’re in big trouble.

That was Dr. Offit again, pediatrician and chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. And there’s a reason I quoted him at length. Pay attention because it’s an important lesson to leave with. The man’s a doctor. I’m not, and most likely, neither are you. He spent a lot of money and went to school for a very long time to ensure that your baby is the happiest, healthiest little bundle of joy this side of the moon. Please put away the crazy ideas from the Internet and listen to the chap.

Cremastery or Cremasturbation?

This past week I attended a private press screening at the Roxie Theater of two of the five Cremaster films by Matthew Barney, in addition to a 2004 collaboration with Arto Lindsay entitled De Lama Lâmina. Barney’s work is certainly not the most conventional way to start the day–the three-hour screening began at 10:00 am–but such an oeuvre on the big screen is a difficult invitation to turn down. The films were being shown in advance of the Roxie’s July 30th two-week engagement where the film cycle will be shown in all its 7.5 hour glory. The screening’s press release says that you haven’t been able to do this since 2003, and the thing will never be available on DVD.

For better or worse, I’ve always regarded Barney’s practice with a bit of skepticism, partly because of the hyperbolic praise heaped on him by critics like the Times’ Michael Kimmelman, but also because of what I found to be the profound waste of his Drawing Restraint show in 2006 at SFMoMA. Lots of hardened white goo and whaling detritus. Almost souvenir shop-like. Big on matériel, small on ideas. Nevertheless, I’d only seen parts of the Cremaster Cycle, and I’d always wanted to see more. Many people I’d spoken to insisted that, all his work aside, the Cremaster stuff needed to be seen.

Barney’s work, even for the most devoted acolytes, has always remained a bit elusive, and it’s usually easier to peg the referent–Bernini to Beuys–than it is to figure out just what the hell is going on. That said, it might help to know that the cremaster is the muscle which controls the movement of the testicles within the scrotum. There, I said it. Now the scene in Cremaster 5 where seven Hungarian bathhouse naifs lasso the Giant’s alien scrotum to a flock of Jacobin pigeons makes a tad more sense. But only somewhat.

The Cremaster movies can be likened to a sort of meditation on reproduction, sexual morphology, and–this being art–death. Barney clearly prizes the fully realized form in these works, and it’s his obsession with material detail, athletic precision, and classical and mythic images of beauty that make the Cremaster films such eye candy. The rest of the fun, of course, is figuring out what you’ve just watched.

I only watched two of the films, and I can only imagine what the cumulative effect of watching all five might be. Revelation? Revulsion? Fatigue? How about profound confusion?

De Lama Lâmina, a sort of addendum to the Roxie’s festivities is a 2004 collaboration with the guitarist Arto Lindsay, which he and Barney filmed during Carnaval celebrations in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Part musical documentary, part myth-entranced and materially elaborate feature work, the film struck me as a bit lopsided. To get the full effect of Barney’s m.o., you have to fully bow in to his world, which surely helps to explain the project of viewing his 7.5 hour film cycle. For De Lama Lâmina, I much more thoroughly enjoyed seeing Lindsay atop a giant Carnaval float singing in Portuguese and jamming over guitar squalls, than I did trying to decipher what a New York Times reviewer described as Barney’s repeated “cuts to the undercarriage of the vehicle, where a Caliban-like man-beast, covered in dirt and vegetation, hangs by his arms and legs in a wheel housing, masturbating against the drive shaft and pausing to dote on a stuffed toy monkey that he cradles like an infant.”

Catch the wunder of Barney’s work beginning July 30th at the Roxie Theater.

The Greatest Recession

Coexistent with the global rise of financial insolvency has been the equal, and yet less heralded loss of cultural capital. Urban dwellers will be familiar with the term “networking.” Prior to the Great Recession, finding a “good job” required on some level to “know someone.” Older friends, peers, and family members all could in theory use their existing employment status as a vector by which someone lacking known experience or credentials could enter their industry or specific company. (Concurrently, the necessity of networking almost certainly prefigured the rise of the intern, for those whose working contacts were either ineffectual or unrelated to a chosen field.)

The collapse of global markets and the attendant hemorrhaging of jobs from across business changed all of this. On one level, the financial ruin of certain companies and industries represented the loss of the Network itself, for if there is no Network for which to aspire to, any attempt to do so is a null and fruitless undertaking. In a different sense, such collapses prefigured the dissolution of networking because as industries shed workers, less and less were in a position for which they could approach, or be approached, about a foothold in the Network.

Under normal employment termination, one should, without much undue stress, be able to turn around and refocus on his or her network of contacts, then re-enter the workforce. In the best of scenarios, such a person’s acquired experience might even obviate the very need for networking. This is no longer the case however. As more and more lost (and continue to lose) their jobs, there were more unemployed workers networking in order to find their next employment opportunity. Unique, however, was that as each new unemployed worker was shed from the Network, their relationship to it was further diminished by every other worker thus shed–for each new unemployed worker is one less person with whom contact can increase a chance at returning to meaningful employment. It is the law of diminishing returns. One works harder for for less and less probability of a successful outcome–in this case, a job.

The unemployed person, thus stripped of financial capital which resulted from his or her loss of wage-earning employment, is now also devoid of a distinct level of cultural capital. Their existence matters less. Under normal conditions, all individuals maintain a basic cache of social worth which is invariably tied up in their concept of self-worth. Stripped of the ability to network or be networked entails a significant demotion in both measures–one inexorably entwined with the other.

The notion need not be abstracted: Individuals unknown to each other will at social events almost invariably ask three questions of one another prior to engaging in lengthier conversation. 1.) What is your name? 2.) Why are you here? (Often, How do you know so-and-so?) and 3.) What do you do? The latter is obviously the question to which we are concerned. It is one of the most uncomfortable and terrifying questions.

Any one person can “do” a number of things, but the question is obviously geared towards ascertaining what someone does professionally, invariably for wages. For the unemployed, there is no answer to this question, and therefore, there is typically no further discussion of it in our hypothetical scenario. Nothing is to be had from the unemployed person. There is no Network from which to entreat or even gossip about. In employment’s place is a void. If both of the parties are unemployed, the effect is no different, only the depth of the insolvency. Instead of one lost soul, there are two. Their worth to the wider social structure diminishes in correlation with their increasing disconnection to the Network. Concurrently, they rapidly lose worth to themselves.

Analyzing the effect of inflation on the individual, the great Bulgarian-born novelist and social theorist Elias Canetti understood the matter thus:

The individual feels depreciated because the unit on which he relied, and with which he had equated himself, starts sliding; and the crowd feels depreciated because the million is…. Together people are worth as little as each is worth alone. As the millions mount up, a whole people, numbered in millions, becomes nothing. [emphasis in the original]

In May, the US Department of Labor estimated the number of unemployed to be 15 million people. When numbers reach such fantastical heights, the resulting social stigma of being without work ceases to be and transmogrifies into an incontrovertible diminution of social value.

The long and winding road

For my faithful, few readers, I apologize for neglecting you. But I have news! Or rather, I’ve been writing news. A review too. Where did we last leave off? 

Ages ago, it seems, I was tracking the imminent demise of San Francisco’s Mission District cultural life, with another aside on (tangentially) related developments in SOMA.

I’ve also attempted to catalog the trials of those privy to the death of California public education, an experience, I’d add, that has been especially troubling since I grew up in South Carolina, at one time (no longer!) the laughing stock of American public education.

For a brief moment, I like to think I single-handedly influenced the Police Commission’s decision to deny the SFPD the use of tasers. Oh, zap!

In addition, my sleuthing on the increasingly labyrinthine scandal involving the SF public utility’s attempt to greenwash compost made of human poo and industrial pollutants has been well documented.

But lest one think I’ve abandoned all pursuits not related to the the doings of Downtown or sourced from smoking guns in underground parking lots, I found time to pen a review of the fun little firecracker of an art show at CCA’s Wattis Institute for the Arts.  

And all month, beneath my nom de plume “BW,” I can be read hyping the certifiably hypable events going down at NYC’s Thirty Days Gallery. I know not from where these people’s money and connections come from, but they have managed to corral Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Gary Panter, Art Speigelman, Will Oldham, and an arc-load of other cultural and artistic icons under one roof for the entire month of April, and then some.

Extra, Extra!

This is not a picture of me, but rather one of the most generic images to be found on the Interweb. However, it is a visual representation of what I will be up to for the next four months. That’s right. I’m a journalist! Temporarily, at this point, but hopefully that doesn’t detract from my ace reporting, a recent example of which, came out today. Read here!

Keep yrself tuned to the San Francisco Bay Guardian (and politics blog) for more, and soon.