My kid got six vaccines in one day, and he regressed. Would i rather have the measles versus autism . Well sign up for the measles. Despite numerous scientific studies that say vaccines are safe, public concern persists. The result outbreaks of Infectious Diseases not seen for a generation. We are not living in a bubble. Its just a matter of time before someone brings that disease into our community. As Public Health officials struggle to communicate with a skeptical public, they face a radically changed social media environment where youtube videos spread virally across the internet. A regular flu shot gone horribly wrong. These people were much more likely to believe something they had seen on youtube than the centers for Disease Control and the fda. Thats a little frightening. Tonight, frontline reports on the science and politics of the bitter vaccine war. Frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. And by the corporatir public broadcasting. Major funding is provided by the john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. And by reva and david logan, committed to Investigative Journalism as the guardian of the public interest. Additional funding is provided by the park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. And by the frontline journalism fund. With grants from scott nathan and laura debonis, and the hagler family. What a cute little face. Aww, here we come. Its a girl yeah shes beautiful. Whats her name . Rachel. Shes beautiful. She doesnt want to cry. Narrator a new life begins. Congratulations. Thank you. Narrator out of her mothers womb, Rachel Murphy is now surrounded by a new world filled with countless germs. Modern medicine will do what it can to protect her. Just a tiny little stick. Narrator barely an hour old, rachel gets her first shot against hepatitis b. This is the first of up to 35 inoculations she will get in the next six years of her life to fight 14 diseases. Its all right. Its okay, princess. Narrator Public Health doctors celebrate vaccines as one of medicines shining achievements. Thats all. Youre okay. Theyve increased our life span by 30 years. Hib would cause 20,000 to 25,000 cases a year gone i mean, polio would paralyze, you know, tens of thousands of children every year gone i mean, diphtheria was the most common killer of. Of teenagers in the 1920s gone i mean, you know, vaccines. The benefit of vaccines is clear. Well, theres now 16 diseases that are preventable by vaccination for children. 14 of those are diseases that we vaccinate infants and Young Children for, and two of them are diseases that we vaccinate adolescence. From my point of view, being able to prevent 16 diseases by vaccination is a really good thing. Narrator but not everyone agrees. Across america, the cdc has discovered certain communities where parents are hesitating to vaccinate their children. One is ashland, oregon. Youre walking . Yeah. What am i going to do with the baby scooter . This is our neighborhood, and we love it because we can walk everywhere. Ashland is a very safe town compared to almost every place else in america. Narrator its a college town, the home of an annual Shakespeare Festival, where a welloff, educated populace has easy access to alternative organic food coop and yoga centers. Go get em narrator jennifer margulis, a writer with a ph. D in english literature, is the mother of four children. When my daughter was born in 1999, the nurse bustled in with her tray and said, okay, its time for your hepatitis b vaccine. And i looked at my daughter and i looked at the nurse, and i said, isnt hepatitis b a sexually transmitted disease . And i said, why am i supposed to vaccinate my newborn baby against a sexually transmitted disease . And the nurse got really mad. Narrator margulis went on to research and write about vaccines, and, in 2009, published a long article about the vaccine debate in mothering magazine, a magazine promoting a natural lifestyle. Why are we giving children so many vaccines . They get four times the number of vaccines than i got when i was a child growing up in thei 70s. As a parent, i would rather see my child get a natural illness and contract that the way that illnesses have been contracted for at least 200,000 years that homo sapiens have been around. Im not afraid of my children getting chicken pox. There are reasons that children get sick. Getting sick is not a bad thing. Narrator in common with many other ashland parents, margulis decided not to fully vaccinate her other children. Ashland has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. An estimated 28 of its children lack some or all of their recommended vaccines. So were going to need today the dtap 5, your final polio. Narrator pediatrician dr. Donna bradshaw walters worries that these parents may unwittingly bring back diseases that havent been seen for decades. And say ahh. Ahh. Good job. The possibility of an outbreak is real here in ashland. We are not living in a bubble, especially in this day and age of international travel. Our Shakespeare Festival draws people from all over the world. And its just a matter of time before someone comes to here from another area who is unimmunized and who has the disease and brings that disease into our community. Narrator there are many pro vaccine parents in ashland who agree, like lorie anderson, whose adopted son evan is fully vaccinated. Its an outbreak waiting to happen. And so i. I dont just care about my own child. My child may be well protected because of his vaccination, but i hate to see people get hurt, injured, die, have to be quarantined, isolated because of an outbreak that is preventable with a vaccine. All they have to do is sign an exemption, and their kid is exempt from immunization before they go to school. I will try not to be angry. I hope it doesnt get contentious. It will, though. It will get contentious if theres an outbreak. If vaccinated children start to get breakthrough disease because of the high rate of unvaccinated children, it probably will get ugly. Narrator the cdc tracks outbreaks of Infectious Diseases around the country from its center in atlanta. In 2008, for example, there were numerous small pockets of infection. One involving measles erupted in an undervaccinated area of san diego. Like most measles outbreaks, it came from abroad. It began when an infected seven yearold returned from a Family Vacation in switzerland on january 15. The child gave measles to two siblings, and collectively they infected classmates at the San Diego CooperativeCharter School in linda vista. A visit to the childrens clinic of la jolla spread the infection to four others. One of these, an infant, flew on a plane to hawaii where she was intercepted and quarantined. Her fellow 250 passengers had to be contacted and tracked. Dr. Wilma wooten is san diego countys Public Health officer. This entire process resulted in exposures of almost 1,000 individuals 90 individuals having no proof of immunization, 73 were quarantined, 12 additional actual cases of measles in san diego. Narrator Public Health officials determined that what allowed measles to enter the community was the number of vaccinehesitant parents who took advantage of the personal belief exemption allowed by california. School principals find themselves caught on the frontlines. The fact is that some families choose not to immunize their children. And then there are families who have children who are particularly medically sensitive, and theyre in jeopardy because they could get sick from unimmunized children. So its a very emotional issue on both sides. Narrator a vast Public Health infrastructure is committed to preventing such outbreaks. The National Institutes of health, the food and drug administration, the centers for Disease Control and prevention, large vaccine manufacturers. The mainstream medical establishment speaks with one voice vaccines are a Public Health miracle far too valuable to put at risk. Emilio emini has spent his life making vaccines in americas pharmaceutical companies. He heads pfizers vaccine operation. People havent seen these diseases in a while, so people become complacent. They dont vaccinate, and what they wind up doing is putting their children and themselves in considerable risk of a severe disease and infection. Polio even though people arent worried about it because havent seen much of it its still present in many parts of the world, and it can easily be introduced into a nonvaccinated population. And for what weve seen in other parts of the world, once its introduced it will spread very rapidly and cause a lot of disease. The fear, my friends, is polio. But soon, perhaps within a year, there may be a vaccine. Thanks for visiting with us. Hey, kids, how about saying goodbye, huh . Say goodbye. Come on, say byebye. When i was a child and the big scare was polio, where you would see your friends playing ball outside with you baseball and basketball and all of a sudden get sick and be in bed, be in an iron lung, and then come out with a deformity, a serious limp or a serious physical disability. That is absolutely frozen in your mind as a very scary scenario. I think were compelled by our own fears. And certainly for my parents, who grew up in the. In the 1920s and 30s and 40s, saw these infections. They saw what they could do. For them, vaccines was an easy sell. Narrator paul offit is a pediatrician and coinventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a pathogen that causes serious fever, vomiting and diarrhea. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s. I saw measles. I had measles. I had mumps. I had german measles. I mean, i knew what those diseases could do. I watched my friends also be sickened by those diseases. And so, for me, vaccines was an easy sell. I think for people now, Young Mothers today not only dont see these diseases, they didnt even grow up with these diseases. So for them, vaccination becomes a matter of faith. Narrator but the faith of some parents has eroded. Offit, for example, is seen in some quarters not as a hero for inventing a successful vaccine but as a selfinterested entrepreneur whom skeptics call dr. Profit. They all have this guy paul offit. You guys know him . audience boos and he is the poster child for the term biostitute. He does not disclose the millions of dollars. Narrator for such critics, the fact that vaccines have made offit rich is enough to discount what he is saying. But offit, a prolific author, makes no apologies. Im the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine, a vaccine that i made in collaboration with merck. And its a vaccine which has caused a dramatic decrease in this country in hospitalization and has caused already a dramatic decrease in hospitalization and death in some countries in the developing world. Im enormously proud of that. I would argue that i have an expertise in rotaviruses and. You also financially benefit from that vaccine. It. Its. I know this isnt going to. Going to sell, but it doesnt matter. It doesnt matter whether i financially have benefited or not. The only thing that mattered is. Is. Is. Is, did the vaccine that we created at Childrens Hospital of philadelphia do what it was claimed to do . Has it prevented hospitalization and suffering and death . And the answer to that question is yes. You like it . Its a mistake that we have a vaccine against rotavirus, the vaccine that paul offit helped to develop. In the third world maybe people are dying of rotavirus, but in this country, you have to do back flips to show a death toll of people from rotavirus. Well, one of the bitter ironies of vaccination is it carries with it the problems of its own success. Narrator author and bio ethicist Arthur Caplan runs a special program at upenn on the ethical issues surrounding vaccines. Many parents are not thinking about the riskside of disease because they dont see those diseases. Theyve never seen any child rendered deaf by the mumps. Theyve never seen somebody whos had a case of polio. I had polio. I was in the hospital paralyzed, legs and neck, for about a year. So i know firsthand what the polio epidemic looked like. I was sort of at the last outbreak before the. The vaccines really came online and eliminated it. Narrator vaccinepreventable diseases like polio have become vanishingly rare in the United States so rare, in fact, that most younger pediatricians have never seen a case. This is one of the few places where you can see what vaccine preventable diseases look like. This is a case of pertussis, also known as whooping cough. The audience is made up of paramedic students. She cant breathe, and thats horrifying for any patient of any age to discover that your airway has closed and you cant inhale. Narrator the teacher, dr. Cynthia cristofani, is a pediatric intensivist who treats children in need of critical care. She decided several years ago to document the rare cases of vaccinepreventable illness that turned up in her portland, oregon, icu. She uses the footage to teach other medics how to recognize these diseases. Im old enough to have seen most of the serious life threatening illnesses that are largely suppressed and some almost eradicated by the modern vaccines. This baby was a victim of rotavirus. Theres major fluid deficiency in this childs tissues. Actually kills over half a million humans annually, most of them elsewhere on the planet. The community recollection for these diseases has largely disappeared, and so the parents of younger kids who are of vaccine age are unlikely to have had any personal experience. And unless the grandparents or others can tell them what it was like and happen to have had knowledge of somebody who had a severe complication, its easy to imagine that these diseases are eradicated. Those spots are actually something probably none of you have ever seen. Theyre chicken pox. This patient had one of the commoner potentially lethal complications of chicken pox. He got strep sepsis from an infected lesion. This child came as close to dying of chicken pox as you can come without doing it. And so i encourage you to remember that chicken pox also can cause fatalities even though most people used to think of it as a rite of passage in childhood and we all got it. You can do better than that. Theres a vaccine. This ones a scary one. This is haemophilus influenza type b meningitis and he was actually the last patient i ever saw with this disease. I can tell you it was the scourge of pediatrics when i was in training because there was no vaccine. But beware it could come back if people stop vaccinating. Why are we giving children so many vaccines . Theres no more polio in the United States and theres no more diphtheria in the United States, and no one, no child, has contracted wild polio since 1979 in the United States. So when do we take polio off the vaccine schedule . When do we say, fantastic, the vaccine worked, we figured it out, we dont have a polio epidemic anymore, lets stop vaccinating against polio . Narrator as vaccine preventable diseases have become less visible, some americans have become more concerned about the risks posed by vaccines than by the diseases they prevent. Public Health Officials like nihs Anthony Fauci have struggled with how to communicate the risks of vaccines without causing undue fear from common side effects such as mild fevers and serious adverse events that are extremely rare. To say that there is no risk in any vaccine would not be truthful. What is the risk of injecting something into someones arm . The risk is that a certain proportion of people will get swelling and a little bit of pain, lasting from an hour to a day. That is a very acceptable risk. A very, very, very small percentage of people will get an allergic reaction. Namely, theres a component of the vaccine that they didnt realize that they were allergic to. And then theres a subset of a very, very, very, very small percentage of those who actually can get a serious reaction. But if you look at that, the risk of that is so minisculely small as to be completely outweighed by the benefit. Narrator the cdcs web site tries to convey all these risks accurately even when scientists are not sure the vaccines are in fact responsible. Heres what it says about the measles vaccine severe problems very rare. Several other severe problems have been known to occur after a child gets mmr vaccine. But this happens so rarely, experts cannot be sure whether they are caused by the vaccine or not. These include deafness, long term seizures, coma or lowered consciousness, permanent brain damage. When the cdc communicates risks, they. They fall into two groups. One is. Are those risks that are very rare but, in fact, are real. Sometimes, very rarely, it can cause a rash later on. And the other are those risks that have been reported following a vaccine but for which we have no evidence that the vaccine actually caused the problem. Those, i would argue, are at best theoretical. My son was a bright, precocious, healthy twoanda halfyearold child in 1980 when i took him in for his fourth dpt shot. Narrator Barbara Loe Fisher runs an independent Watchdog Organization dedicated to vaccine safety issues. National Vaccine Information center. Narrator its an organization she helped found in 1982 after her son suffered a serious vaccine side effect. To make a long story short, after that, he regressed physically, mentally and emotionally and became a totally different child. He was eventually diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities and attentiondeficit disorder and had to remain in a classroom for the learning disabled throughout his public school. Narrator Fishers Organization lobbied successfully for laws that promote vaccine safety. Today, a much safer vaccine has replaced dpt. The laws also created a special Vaccine Court to evalu