Review – The Vaccine Book

The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child

by Dr. Robert W. Sears, published 2011

How many people who are “pro-vaccine” have read a book about vaccines?

How many people are aware of the frequency, severity and treatability of diseases which have vaccines available before deciding to take the vaccine? How many people understand the common, rare and potentially severe side effects, the physical components in the vaccines, the method by which the vaccine is manufactured and the availability of competing vaccine brands and production methods?

How many people understand the common vectors of each vaccine treatable disease and thus how to potentially avoid exposure to it entirely?

Who is likely to be better read on the subject of vaccines (even if you argued that they are ultimately misinformed)– your average vaccine taker, or your average vaccine skeptic?

Dr. Bob Sears is “pro-vaccine”– he believes vaccines have done more good than harm in the history of medicine and that they are an important part of individual and public health practices and he believes the standard vaccine schedules for infants and adults should be followed with few exceptions. So why is he having his medical license put under review because he supposedly gave a “non-evidence based” recommendation to a family to not vaccinate their child?

Because it’s hard to imagine a world in which a doctor would come under the scrutiny of authorities for giving a pro-intervention recommendation to a patient that was “non-evidence based”, perhaps we can assume that it is because Dr. Bob has challenged the medical establishment on the most fundamental level possible by writing a book which posits that patients should be informed about their choices and should ultimately provide knowledgeable consent before proceeding with a potentially dangerous treatment regimen such as infant vaccination. Sadly, if you ask most doctors to explain why they want to treat you the way that they do, what you get is not “evidence based” dialog about your choices, but sarcastic reminders about whose medical school plaque is on the wall.

It’s sometimes more like a priesthood than a profession, even though that doesn’t necessarily mean their advice is wrong or should be ignored.

So that is the controversy, but what does Dr. Sears actually say about vaccines?

The first twelve chapters of the book are dedicated to one disease each and its respective vaccine; the remaining chapters explore vaccine research, vaccine safety, vaccine ingredients, vaccine side effects and other topics.

The disease chapters outline the common course of each disease including symptoms, severity and treatment, followed by the common vaccine options available on the market including their preparation method and ingredients and common and rare side effects. There is a “pro” and “con” section exploring reasons to consider administering the vaccine and reasons why people/parents have not wanted to take the vaccine, and then Dr. Sears weighs in with his own take on how important the vaccine is. Each chapter helpfully summarizes the information with simple boxed call outs indicating whether the disease is common, severe and treatable (without a vaccine).

The common/severe/treatable approach is interesting. I found a lot of the diseases covered not-threatening because of the various combinations they “checked” in each category: a disease might be severe and treatable, and not common, or common, but not severe and treatable. The worst combination would be common, severe and untreatable– I don’t remember any disease with that profile. Just the opposite, in fact. According to Dr. Sears, with thanks mostly to widespread vaccination, most of the diseases mentioned are not common (to the point that they’re actually or practically eradicated in the US/West) so there is almost no chance of catching it, vaccinated or not. Several others are typically so minor in their symptoms, especially in infants (versus adults), that they might be mistaken for a common cold if caught. And those that are potentially severe seem to be treatable with antibiotics in most cases, especially if diagnosed early in the course of the illness.

That being said, some of these diseases have the potential to put the victim in the hospital if the disease is not checked early, or it happens to be especially challenging to an individual’s immune system. In such a situation, even with a full recovery and no lasting damage the experience itself is likely to be stressful, costly, traumatic for the child and heartbreaking for the parents to watch– it’s not a joke as far as risks go, and it needs to be considered seriously. And a few of the diseases, if caught and if particularly intense in the course of the disease, do risk permanent neurological or organ damage even if successfully treated. That’s a terrifying possibility!

Reading between the lines a little bit here, Dr. Sears seems pretty clear that whatever risks there are for an unvaccinated child in contracting and fighting any of these diseases, they are even smaller for a child who is breastfed and avoids day care or other germ-ridden public child environments. Assuming this is the course a parent is following with their infant (as we are), it seems a lot more like a judgement call between accepting the risks of rare disease complications the child is likely never to get, or accepting the risks of vaccine side effects (short and long-term) which are inevitable and seemingly random in their frequency and severity. There are several diseases/vaccines mentioned which simply pose no risk whatsoever (chickenpox), or for which the illness can not be contracted by the infant without an infected mother who transmits it during pregnancy or birth, or for which the illness and vaccine do not become relevant until adolescence or adulthood (such as HPV, a sexually-transmitted disease). Taking what’s left, and given our commitment to breastfeeding and homecare/homeschooling, it just doesn’t look like vaccines make a lot of sense for our family.

That was the part of the book I struggled with the most, when Dr. Sears recommended a vaccine not for the infant’s safety, but for public health reasons, such as to maintain low prevalence of a disease across a population, or to protect at-risk family members or caregivers who could catch the disease from the infant and have a more difficult time fighting it (for example, Dr. Sears talks about how a pregnant school teacher could catch a disease from unvaccinated students that could harm her unborn child). This is all good information to have and consider in the event of one of these complicating circumstances actually being relevant to a family’s situation, and certainly the “moral” issues are worth considering and debating, but it seems clear that if the question is simply put as “Does this vaccine represent a worthwhile risk/reward profile to the individual being vaccinated?” the answer we arrived at was often “No.” That’s a very different question from “Is it our job to take health risks with our child to protect other people/children from health risks?”

Interestingly, smallpox has been eradicated but the vaccine is no longer given to preserve herd immunity. Instead it is controlled by the US government as a national defense reserve. In identical situations where a disease, such as polio, has been practically eradicated, Dr. Sears still recommends getting the vaccine for public health reasons, but with smallpox there is no suggestion that the public needs to keep getting vaccinated to be protected from an eradicated illness. Why the different logic?

Another item I made special note of was the relationship between traveling, domestically and internationally, and vaccination of an infant. Dr. Sears is explicit in saying that flying around on airplanes is not an easy way to catch a vaccine-preventable disease, and that there is essentially no risk of this happening for travel within the US, and there is very little chance of this happening for travel outside the US. He does suggest that people who are essentially “living in the bush”, doing missionary work in remote locations or areas where these diseases are endemic in the population, are at special risk for some of these illnesses, but again this doesn’t apply to us because we aren’t going to be traveling to poverty-ridden areas or where access to clean water might be an issue. It was comforting to know that travel as part of our lifestyle doesn’t really need to be changed because of our decision not to follow the recommended infant vaccination schedule.

The other thing I wanted to mention is Dr. Sears’s opinion about the state of vaccine safety research. In short, he says a lot of the studies are wanting. Here are some especially troubling quotes:

Some vaccines aren’t studied alone. Instead, they are given along with several other vaccines, so there is no way to know what their actual side effects may be.

[…]

Most vaccine side effects are monitored for a short time via parent questionnaires.

[…]

Out of the twenty-three major studies done to date that show no link between vaccines and autism, eighteen have some conflict of interest involving vaccine manufacturers. Similarly, the addition of the hepatitis B vaccine to the infant schedule was driven largely by research done by doctors who worked for the vaccine manufacturers.

[…]

What about the statistical chance that your child might get a severe, life-threatening case of one of these diseases? To my knowledge, that information has never been determined accurately through precise scientific statistical analysis. [… Dr. Sears estimates these risks as follows:] A very rough total of 55,000 cases of severe diseases each year in children. We know that the current US population of kids twelve and under is about 60 million. Dividing 60 million by 55,000 cases means that each child has a 1 in 1090 chance of suffering a severe case of a vaccine-preventable illness over the first twelve years of life. Note that flu and rotavirus are responsible for most of these cases. If one were to run the numbers without those two diseases, the risk of suffering a severe case of one of the uncommon disease is only about 1 in 6000. Most severe pediatric cases occur during the first two years of life. An estimation of severe cases in children two years and younger would be about 34,000 cases divided by 10 million kids, or about 1 in 300.

[…]

What is very clear, however, is that vaccines have triggered autism in a very small number of children. A phrase I recently heard sums it up very well: Vaccines don’t cause autism… except when they do.

[…]

If we were to throw out all research that has some conflict of interest, we would actually be left with very little on either side of the [vaccine-autism] debate […] the right type of research has not been done yet.

In addition, here is what Dr. Sears would consider to be the minimum standard for a valid safety research study, which might be helpful for people trying to evaluate various studies in making up their mind about the risks posed by diseases and their vaccines:

• Prospective: the study group is selected and then followed in real time. Virtually all current research has been retrospective, looking back into the past at data on groups of children who have since grown up (for which the outcome is already known).
• Randomized: test subjects are selected at random and placed in either the study or the placebo group in a random manner to avoid bias.
• Placebo-controlled: a study group exists that is not receiving the treatment in question (in this case, vaccines). This is the primary way to be able to draw conclusions with a high degree of accuracy.
• Double-blind study: the researchers and the study subjects don’t know who is receiving the test treatment (vaccines). This prevents bias as the researchers observe and collect, and the test subjects report, data.
• Large-scale research: this is needed for a study to be considered statistically significant and to prove the findings aren’t simply due to chance.

Interestingly, he explains why these studies haven’t been performed to date, and I am not surprised to report it is not an example of “market failure”! The government, as usual, plays a big role here.

A final note: There are several instances where Dr. Sears refers to a disease which has been practically eradicated, but which in recent memory has experienced a sudden outbreak in a localized community before being contained. Aside from a generic geographic description, such as “a neighborhood in Ohio” or something like that, there is no demographic data given about these outbreaks, if it is even collected and publicly known. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know that? If these periodic outbreaks are restricted to specific socio-economic populations, wouldn’t that change the implied incidence of risk for the population as a whole? I’d want to know that information, but the current state of medical research in our country considers this unscientific and irrelevant, so much so that it is politically incorrect to wonder about it. How can facts be offensive? It seems like there is an attempt to control political dialogue here, which I find disturbing.

This book has many virtues but its greatest one is that the information is both comprehensive and well organized, while still remaining succinct. It’s very easy to approach the question of vaccination, its risks and benefits, from a number of angles and find all of them anticipated by this book, and more.

The Open, Free Intellectual Environment Of The American University

A fellow investor friend of mine sent me an e-mail and suggested I read “What’s the point?” by UK fund manager Terry Smith. We were originally talking about Michael Burry’s commencement speech at UCLA [PDF] and the idea that one of the things that was so extraordinary about it is the way he unmasked the villains and the corruption and spoke the truth unapologetically in such a public forum. I had also, in an earlier e-mail, complained about my lack of interest in blogging, feeling frustrated lately at the nearly overwhelming volume of fallacious bullshit floating around the net that seems to deserve a response yet leaves me tired and bored out of my mind every time I attempt another mud wrestling fiasco.

I don’t know if my frustration inspired the link to Terry Smith or if it was simply the next step in the theme of telling it like it is or what, but that blog post got me thinking. I’ve long thought about giving it one last hurrah and then hanging up my hat. Because, seriously, what is the point? You can tell the truth a million times but if your opponent is bent on lies and deceit, nothing can be done. (Of course, Mises adopted the slogan, from Virgil, of “Tu ne cede malis”, but he’s a smarter man than I, with more energy, apparently.)

In light of this, I wanted to share three critical experiences I had in college during my sophomore, junior and senior years, respectively, which have stuck with me to this day and serve, subtlety and fundamentally, to color my view of the intellectual Opposition. I believe my experiences are not unique, although few people besides me may have had the required awareness to realize it, and as such where I went to school back then is not important to the story. This is not about an institution but rather the institution of the American academic system and its culture as it exists today, and likely has existed for awhile before now and probably longer still in the future.

I want to give some insight into why I find it hard not to be dismissive of many people who claim to think differently than me on various philosophical subjects.

I first became suspicious of my academic curriculum when I learned that microeconomics was not a prerequisite for macroeconomics. Rather than being treated as fundamental knowledge built upon and reexamined from a more global standpoint in macroeconomics, microeconomics was treated as a separate discipline entirely, which could be studied before, during, or after macroeconomics or even not at all (at least, if you weren’t concerned about getting an economics degree). Of course, numerous macroeconomic theories contradicted accepted wisdom taught in the microeconomics course, but no explanation was given as to the nature and source of these apparent contradictions, nor where it was in the economic causal chain that things stopped making micro-sense and started making macro-sense. There was simply a dichotomy in place and you were expected to accept it and move on.

In my second year I was excited to take a class with a professor teaching “international trade” (you know, the separate set of economic principles and rules that apply when two people exchange goods across imaginary political boundaries). Everyone I knew who had taken the class spoke highly of this professor as a competent and entertaining lecturer and said the material itself was quite fun. We spent a lot of time in that class studying the roles of quotas, tariffs and other government interference in the economy. It was really about political economy, not economics, because economics doesn’t change when you move stuff over imaginary lines.

But what rubbed me kind of raw in the class was when this beloved professor spoke quite approvingly of the idea, built into his theoretical examples in class, of providing “transfer payments” (read: violent redistributive extortion for special interest groups carried out by the government) to currently privileged groups who would be “hurt” by “free trade”. This professor advocated that paying these highwaymen off and reaping the benefits of freer trade was a good idea in the long run.

“Uh, question, professor– wouldn’t it be best to just have free trade, without a complicated system of quotas, tariffs and transfer payments to interest groups? Isn’t that most economically efficient? Why don’t we learn about that?” This question got a knowing smirk and a request to meet the good professor privately during office hours to discuss, as there simply wasn’t enough time in lecture to discuss such twaddle.

Dutifully, I scheduled some office hours time to meet with the beloved professor and discuss. Again, I posed the question to him, why are we paying these people off? Isn’t it better to let them figure out their own way to survive a competitive market place without getting welfare from everyone else? After all, they have no right to a certain income or position within the market place. Again, a knowing smirk as the professor launched into a short anecdote about how he once was full of piss and vinegar like I about these subjects. But the truth of the matter, he told me, was more complicated.

And then he, in so many words, spilled the beans– if “we” don’t bribe these special interest groups with redistributive social justice, they’ll get their pitchforks and their torches and elect another Hitler. That was it. That was why he doesn’t teach actual free trade economics in his course. That’s why he thinks transfer payments are good. That’s why he was for FDR’s New Deal and the Social Security scam. He saw it as the only thing standing between us, and Hitler.

I tried to make the point that if you fear totalitarianism, transfer payments are actually a step toward totalitarianism, not a step away. He responded by suggesting that granting these dictator-electors-in-the-wings a little welfare would create some kind of social anchor where we’d go no further toward socialism past that point, having bought the evildoers off. Never mind people tried to buy Hitler off and he just asked for more until he went to war. And never mind that the US government has had to move far, far beyond the New Deal since then to keep neo-Hitler at bay, according to his logic.

At this point, having no response to my observation of yet another contradiction, I was informed that office hours had suddenly come to an end (I’d only been there for thirty minutes and had scheduled an hour and I didn’t see anyone waiting in the hall for an audience) and that although he really enjoyed our conversation, he was going to have to ask me to come visit with him during the summer to continue the conversation. Of course he knew I was an out of state student who would be returning home during the summer so he was actually dodging his responsibility to make sense of his intellectual positions.

I left his office reeling in confusion and frustration. Here is a guy that my peers think is one of the best instructors the university has to offer, he is considered to be a thoughtful and intellectual person, etc. Yet, I come to find out he is teaching disingenuously. He is guilty of the “smuggled premise”, that is, his economic values taught in his class have nothing to do with sound economic reasoning but rather a personal, political belief that is never named nor mentioned which is thereby “smuggled” into the lessons. Instead of being honest and telling his students “I am teaching you a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make economic sense, because I think it makes political sense”, he carries out his pedagogical mission in such a way that he exploits his students ignorance and credulity.

Why can’t this professor just tell everyone what he really believes? Are we not old enough for the truth? Did we not pay for the truth? Do we not expect the truth?

To say I was disappointed by this experience would be an understatement. But I tried to put it behind me as I continued my economic studies.

During my third year, I had another run in with an economics professor, this time one teaching a “money and banking” course who had done some consulting for the Fed and who used as a textbook in his class the work of the notorious intellectual bungler, Frederic Mishkin. I raised a lot of challenges to the material which were poorly handled by the professor, but there is one in particular that will always stand out to me because of its zaniness. We were discussing the “money multiplier” of fractional reserve banking and how with a tiny base of reserves banks could pyramid large amounts of credit on top and lever up their balance sheets. I raised my hand and asked, “Doesn’t levering the balance sheet increase the risk of crisis for the bank and for the banking system?”

The professor acknowledged that, well, yes, it does, but it’s all done within the proscription of the FDIC guaranteeing everyone’s deposits and the Fed serving as lender of last resort to prevent a total collapse. Then I asked, “Well isn’t that crisis kind of inevitable when you create duration mismatch between funds that are borrowed short and lent long like this?” And the professor acknowledged, well, yes, it does, but again it’s all done under the keen watch of the overseer regulatory bodies, this time a little bit more apprehensive. And then I went for the F-word. I raised my hand, “But professor, isn’t it fraud to lend out people’s money that they think is being held for safe-keeping at the bank? Why not have the bank separate the two activities, safe-keeping and loan-brokering?”

There was a pause and he looked kind of startled. His skin color rose and his face contorted into a mixture of anger and glee, because now he had “figured me out” and knew my true motive. He exploded: “So I guess if it were up to you the banks wouldn’t make any money, huh?!”

A little shocked at his outburst, I stammered, “Well, no, of course not, I don’t really see what their profitability has to do with my question…” but he cut me off. “Yeah, I see what you’re trying to do. You don’t want the banks to make any money, do ya?! Well, it’s a nice ideal but it doesn’t work in the real world and if banks didn’t make any money, we wouldn’t have any banks and you wouldn’t want to live in a world without banks!” he growled, signaling that question time was over and it was time to get back to his brilliant lecture on fraud-based banking economics.

The episode was so instructive for me. So THAT’S what he’s about– shilling for fraudulent reserve banking, not trying to explore the truth of the matter. He neatly dodged my very simple, very honest inquiry of how we might live in a world without systemic banking risk, a world which would still allow profit opportunities for banking operations. Instead, he constructed a false dichotomy — systemic risk due to fraud, and profit; or no profit and no banks — and then browbeat me and anyone else in the class who was listening to avoid serious discussion of the principle. It suddenly put things into perspective for me. He wasn’t there to impart any real knowledge about the economy to me, he was there to be a hatchet man and paid minion for the banking establishment as it stands today. Wouldn’t want any bright-eyed college kids getting uppity and questioning the scam now, would we?

I really thought that would be the tops. But then I got to my Labor Economics class in my fourth year.

You might be wondering at this point, “Labor economics? Are you mad? Why did you take that course as an elective?” It would be a reasonable question, but the truth is that it was the least horrible option amongst what I had to choose from at the time. To say I went into it with low expectations is an understatement.

Those low expectations were met admirably on two separate occasions, which were not the only examples to choose from but simply the most illustrative.

My professorista had spent her entire life after high school in academia and government bureaucracies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I would be surprised if she ever held a part time job as a youngster in the private sector. She demonstrated zero familiarity with the reality of markets. One day she provided the class her argument for government intervention in the economy, which was based on the “paradox of capitalism”, this being that capitalism is SO efficient and SO productive, that it drives things down to the cost of “near 0” (not actually zero, because that’d obviously imply superabundance and the end of scarcity for that good or service) and therefore these things become “uneconomic” to produce and won’t be provided for under the profit system, which means if we want them government must provide them as a public good.

One example she gave of this was childcare services. Now, let’s ignore the “empirical” fact that there are numerous for-profit childcare services out there, right here and now, which would seem to undermine her argument completely. Let’s just think about this logically for a second.

So long as a given good does not have a cost of 0, it is not superabundant and it is an economizable resource. For example, air is not an economic good because it is superabundant. You can breathe as much air as you need and don’t have to think about what you’d give up to ensure your supply of air, it’s just there. It has a cost of 0. But if it has a cost above 0, it must be economized, something must be given up to get it. And if at a particular point in time firms are so numerous and efficient at supplying a good, such as childcare services, that they can’t make a profit, what will happen is that the least efficient firms of the bunch will consume their capital (by earning losses over and over again) and exit the marketplace. And when they do this, the level of profitability for remaining firms will rise because the lowered supply will result in the ability to charge higher prices.

And this dynamic will play out forever over the life of the industry so long as people value childcare services. There will be a constant competitive dynamic tending toward the “right” supply of childcare services because the least efficient providers will exit with losses. And this is “good” from the standpoint of anyone interested in participating in the economy because it means that those extraneous resources will flood into other, underserved industries where profitability is much higher, indicating a relatively more important use for the resources versus childcare. At no point will the market stop providing childcare services entirely, requiring a timely government intervention and provision of this service to correct a “market failure.”

Well, recognizing that as the hogwash it was, I raised my hand and began disputing the logic just as I did above. She was so dumbfounded that I had the temerity to question her transparently flawed reasoning that she began what could best be called “sputtering”, rolling her eyes and trying to form even one word in response as if she were having a seizure. Finally, she gave up and said, “Would anyone like to respond to that and explain why he is wrong?” About ten different hands shot up, eagerly, and she called on a young man who halfway turned around in his chair to straddle his view between me in the back and her approving glances in the front. He began, “Governments can and should correct market failures, which happen frequently. For example, while I was studying abroad in Ghana, the government provided public bus service to the village I was staying at because it wasn’t profitable for private businessmen…”

I stopped him right there and pointed out that the lack of profitability is part of the phenomenon I just described, and it suggests the wastefulness of bus service to a small African village. The class erupted with anger and indignation. This was so not politically correct to suggest some poor villagers in Africa didn’t merit a dedicated bus service just because it wasn’t profitable to provide it! This lecture hall had about one hundred students in it. Suddenly, they were a-chatter, half of them noisily discussing how outrageous my view was amongst themselves, the other half turned and shouting/arguing with me simultaneously while the young man with the bus service anecdote continued droning on. This went on for several minutes before the professorista tried to get control back over the class and insisted we finish up the lesson, but by then it was too late as class was over and everyone made for the exits.

It was at this point that as people filtered out a guy sitting a little in front and to the right of me turned around and said, “For what it’s worth, I agree with you,” and then grabbed his bag and walked out. I guess it was better than thinking the entire class was ready to lynch me, but he certainly didn’t feel the need to come to my rescue in the heat of the argument!

The other memorable moment from that class came right near the end of the semester. The Wall Street investment banks were beginning their meltdown and that particular morning Bear Stearns had failed, which was all over the news and which had greatly agitated the students as several had received offers of employment there at the conclusion of the semester which were now in jeopardy. The professorista sought to calm everyone’s nerves by saying that this was a limited event, contained to a specific firm with poor risk controls and the Fed and the regulatory agencies were all over it.

I raised my hand and pointed out that this was indicative of a systematic impending crisis, that the authorities were NOT in control as evidenced by the fact that it had happened, and that it would get a lot worse before it got any better. I suggested that this was the first of many failures to come.

“Would you like to bet on that?” she said, mischievously, expecting me to back down with the bravado.

“I already have!” I exclaimed, as I had taken a few minor positions in my brokerage account at the time (don’t worry, I didn’t make out like John Paulson).

“Well, we’ll see…” she said, trying to quiet me down.

Yes, we did, didn’t we? I never followed up with her to see what she thought of giving me a hard time about my prediction in class, or whether she was willing to confess she had had it all wrong, but I think it demonstrates again a clear blind spot in the mindset of mainstream academics who are responsible for instructing this country’s (and the world’s) future leaders and productive people about intellectual curiosity, academic honesty and the nature of reality.

How many parents are aware of this when they insist their children must go to college? How many have audited the value of their kid’s higher education and determined that the small fortune it takes to get them through a “better” private institution is worth it in the face of antics like what I’ve described above?