[Update 11/13: See my new post today, which corrects some misinformation in Ioffe’s piece and suggests that maybe this wasn’t Jenny McCarthy’s fault after all.]
Julia Ioffe has a cold.
Well, not exactly. She has a “100-day cough,” otherwise known as pertussis, or whooping cough. She has been coughing for 72 days. “Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself,” she writes in The New Republic, where she is a senior editor.
The good news is she has only a month or so left to whoop, meaning her colleagues have “a good month of my hackery left to joke about.” Fortunately, she is an adult and will likely survive. Many infants with whooping cough don’t.
She doesn’t blame Bordetella pertussis, the bacterium responsible for the whoops. “We’ve come to think of it as an ailment suffered in sub-Saharan Africa or in Brontë novels. And for two or three generations, it was,” she writes. “Until, that is, the anti-vaccination movement really got going in the last few years.”
She doesn’t bother to explain why she blames Jenny McCarthy, because, as most readers should know, McCarthy has been a prominent vaccine denialist. Ioffe makes clear that McCarthy’s personal decision regarding her children has important public-health consequences. Namely, it can allow the disease to once again gain a foothold in the U.S. population.
This is a short piece; Ioffe could have said more, and I would have been eager to read it. But she might argue that, in this case, that would dilute her message, which is this: “So thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013.”
The personal is political.
[Update 11/12: Ioffe notes that she was vaccinated, but reports that the vaccine wears off in adults. When all children were vaccinated, that didn’t matter. Now it does.]
-Paul Raeburn
The problem isn’t just anti-vaccine activists, it’s also the CDC. After complaints about whole cell Pertussis vaccines, the Tetanus booster shots got the Pertussis components removed. The old DPT booster for Diphtheria, Pertussis, and Tetanus were replaced with the TD. Later the FDA approved the TDaP with acellular Pertussis. It’s not a quite as good as the old DPT booster, but it causes fewer side effects than the whole cell booster for Pertussis. The FDA and CDC, however were recommending adults substitute just one DTaP for a TD (the adult formulated booster) in a lifetime after age 18 when getting a Tetanus booster. Furthermore the FDA prohibited anyone 64 or older from getting an anti-Pertussis containing vaccine til the early 2010’s. There is a large population of adults who have not received a Tetanus booster containing a Pertussis component since the mid 1980s. The FDA has changed the recommendations some. Now they say that adults who tolerate the TDaP well can get a TDaP every time they get boosted rather than just once after age 18. Also it is now standard practice to give pregnant women a TDaP in the last trimester of each pregnancy in order to protect their babies in the first couple of months after birth before they are old enough to receive their first DTaP (pediatric formulation) vaccinations at 2 months.