A Pew Research Center poll released Monday showed that 9 percent of the American public believe that vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) are “not safe” for healthy children. A large chunk, totaling about 7 percent, claim not to know one way or the other.
The looming danger behind those two figures is obvious to the 83 percent of us who understand that the kind of diseases MMR is designed to prevent are far more serious to a child’s health than any potential side effects.
The risk and severity of a disease like measles should be enough. When it comes to a child’s safety, every good parent will follow the statistically safer path.
But the careful terminology that scientists use on a daily basis has a different tone when carried over into day-to-day life.
Their jargon leans towards extreme precision, and always leaves room for doubt. The earth’s spherical shape is a no-brainer fact every child knows. But, in scientific vocabulary, the theory of a spherical earth is “the best theory we have based on the evidence.”
Make no mistake, scientists know the earth is round just as well as we do. However, they work in a field that recognizes that human beings have, at some point, been wrong about every single aspect of the universe.
They believe it better to leave some room for doubt than to hold to assumptions that might be overturned later.
For example, the CDC is in the uncomfortable position of saying that the risk of the MMR vaccine causing “serious harm, or death, is extremely small.”
But what does that phrase mean? For non-scientists, the risk of running out of gasoline on a given day is “extremely small.” The risk of tripping over your feet while holding a full plate of food is “extremely small.”
Any parent taking their child to a clinic for a vaccine would hesitate at taking an “extremely small” risk that their child would be seriously injured or killed.
But in technical terms, “extremely small” takes on a completely different meaning. The “extremely small” risk of severe allergic reaction for the MMR vaccine is fewer than four cases per million vaccinations.
This is an incomprehensibly minuscule number. We throw the word “million” around so much (mostly in financial terms) that it seems familiar and knowable. The way in which we conceive of numbers makes that four seem awfully large in comparison.
The more one thinks about it, the starkness of that “fewer than four” seems to almost rival the 999,996 or so other successful vaccinations.
But the facts of the matter will eventually make themselves clear once one does a little bit of math. In comparison with measles, with a mortality rate that can reach as high as 10 percent, the risk presented by vaccines seem negligible.
To put it another way, a healthy child is at least 25,000 times more likely to die from measles (if infected) than have a severe allergic reaction from vaccines.
The statistics seem to speak for themselves: not getting your kids vaccinated is far more dangerous than letting your kid risk measles.
But the way people untrained in the sciences interpret statistics can sometimes skew how we perceive medical risk.
The quest for a sufficiently vaccinated country is less a question of “spreading the word” than trying to wrangle an understandable narrative about vaccines out of two languages: the every-day and the scientific.
More than popular scientific spokespersons to speak out for vaccines, we need translators to lay out the exact risks involved, and why foregoing vaccines is far, far more dangerous than the diseases involved.