Monthly Archives: September 2020

Two Sides of the Same Coin

September 28, 2020 By in Anthony Fauci, BioLogos, corona, Covid, Francis Collins, Michael Zimmerman, vaccine denial 2 Comments

It was a typical birthday party for a ten-year-old boy – balloons, cake, rambunctious kids. Oh, and party favors, too! 

But this was not your usual grab bag of gum and cheap toys. 

The loot bags also contained a British five-pound note, worth about $10.00 at the time. There was one small catch…

In order to get the party-prize, each little guest had to let the birthday boy’s dad draw a blood sample. 

Later, Dad laughingly recounted the hilariousness of the situation: “I lined them up and they stuck out their arms. Kids were fainting. One kid threw up all over his mother. It was just your standard 10-year-old’s birthday.”

And you thought bounce houses got out of control.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield used the blood samples he collected at his son’s birthday party in one of the most notorious medical studies in modern times. Wakefield’s study, published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet, triggered a decades-long collapse of public confidence in one of the most significant medical advances in human history: vaccination. 

In his 1998 article, Wakefield claimed that in eight children, the onset of autism followed immunization with the MMR vaccine. Researchers all over the world tried to replicate his results, but no one could.

Still, vaccination rates plummeted in the UK and in the United States. 

The thing is . . . Wakefield made it all up.

The birthday party was just the beginning. In addition to an uncontrolled study with sketchy “volunteer” recruitment, he fabricated data. Before the Lancet article was published, Wakefield filed a patent for his own version of the MMR. Wakefield was also being paid for his “expert” testimony in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.

Twelve years after publication, the Lancet retracted the article and Wakefield lost his medical license. Decades of world-wide research and tens of thousands of cases demonstrate no link between autism and vaccination.

Unrepentant, Wakefield continues to travel and speak to anti-vaccine groups. Despite the loss of a “measles-free” status in the UK and multiple measles outbreaks in the United States, groups continue to pay Wakefield thousands of dollars for his “expertise”. To celebrities and everyday moms and dads who do not want to “poison” their children, Wakefield is a martyr. 

Unfortunately, the science behind vaccine safety is lost on those with an anti-vaccination mindset. Research shows that exposure to science evidence reenforces anti-vaccination perceptions of parents. Emotions trump evidence.

Welcome to 2020, and welcome to the flip side of the anti-vaccination coin. 

As the world awaits the release of one of several Covid-19 vaccines now in phase-3 trials, opposition to the vaccine is rising, and from a very surprising precinct. Anti-Covid-19 vaccine voices are getting louder, and one in particular caught the attention of NIH director Francis Collins. 

Michael Zimmerman is a biologist and the founder of the Clergy Letter Project, an effort demonstrating that religion and science are not in conflict. Zimmerman begins his essay by citing his Ph.D. in biology, his opposition to the pseudo-science of vaccine denial, and his generalized rejection of conspiracy theories.

Yet, Zimmerman declares his opposition to a Covid-19 vaccine – at least for the next three months.

Zimmerman and other newly-minted antivaxxers do not trust the current administration. Zimmerman fears the anti-science dogma touted by the Trump administration. Zimmerman and others fear political pressure on the CDC and the FDA will result in the release of a risky vaccine. 

Collins, in his public response to Zimmerman, is direct and uncharacteristically blunt. 

Shouldn’t you reserve judgement until you see the data? Collins asks. 

The vaccine approval process is transparent and is overseen by respected life-long scientists like Collins and Anthony Fauci. And unlike “America’s Frontline Doctors’” claims in their fifteen minutes of summer fame, legitimate science studies are transparent and published for critical review.

In response to Collins’ hope for a Covid-19 vaccine by the end of 2020, Zimmerman writes this: 

“I hope your prediction is off by a month and that approval doesn’t occur until after 20 January 2021 with a new administration in place.”

To which Collins replied:

“Be careful that you don’t end up hoping and praying for the vaccine to arrive after January 20 — when an earlier scientifically rigorous result would have potentially saved many lives.”

To those who are usually on Team Science but find themselves rooting against a Covid-19 vaccine: trust the process. If you don’t trust Trump, fine. Trust Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, two scientists with decades of stellar public health service and a history of withstanding political pressure from both parties. 

Recently, Fauci publicly took the CDC to task for an announcement made while he was under general anesthesia. Fauci lost no time in setting the record straight with his disapproval. And last week, Fauci scolded Senator Rand Paul in a congressional hearing for his repeated misrepresentations of Covid-19 evidence. 

Traditional anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 anti-vaxxers are two sides of the same coin. At their core, both groups mistrust science. Both groups are influenced by deeply held, emotional beliefs. 

Both traditional anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 anti-vaxxers threaten public health and the goal of herd immunity.

On September 25, 2020, Francis Collins was awarded the Templeton Prize for a lifetime of demonstrating harmony between modern science and faith. In his acceptance speech, Collins encourages us to return to our calling to love one another – both friends and enemies.

Loving our neighbor as ourselves means loving all our neighbors: our immunocompromised neighbors, our elderly neighbors, our newborn neighbors, our medically fragile neighbors, our neighbors undergoing chemotherapy. 

If you are medically able to be vaccinated, you are practicing love in a very real, very practical way. 

(Read the correspondence between Francis Collins and Michael Zimmerman here) 

And as You speak
A hundred billion creatures catch Your breath
Evolving in pursuit of what You said
If it all reveals Your nature so will I

(Hillsong United “So Will I“)

string theory

Proud Mary

September 5, 2020 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Mary Mallon was proud of her craft. 

At the turn of the 20th century, Mary was in demand by wealthy Manhattan families for her skills as a cook. One day, a city official, George Soper, knocked on the door of the fancy brownstone where Mary was employed. 

He had a few simple requests to make of Mary. Could he please have a sample of her blood, her urine, and her feces? Oh, and, this little question: Did she regularly wash her hands after going to the bathroom?

That was one question too many for Mary. She grabbed a carving fork, swore, and lunged for the man, who wisely exited the home.

And you thought the Target and Walmart anti-maskers overreacted.

Four months prior to his abrupt ouster from Mary’s place of employment, Sober, a New York City sanitary engineer, was asked to investigate an epidemic that would eventually sicken thousands of New Yorkers. Soper began by interviewing a particularly hard-hit family in their Long Island summer home. 

Just weeks into their vacation, the family’s nine-year-old daughter fell seriously ill. All told, six out of eleven members of the household, both family and staff, fell sick. 

Soper interviewed the family and discovered that the cook – Mary Mallon – had returned to New York City soon after, apparently healthy as a horse. 

New York was in the midst of a typhoid fever epidemic. Typhoid fever is caused by Salmonella bacteria and in 1907, was fatal in ten percent of infections. Immunization against typhoid fever was four years away and an effective antibiotic was almost forty years away. Carried in feces and usually found in areas with poor sanitation, typhoid fever’s appearance in wealthy areas was a mystery.

But Soper was onto to something. He questioned the family about the menus prepared by Mary, and discovered that shortly before illness broke out, Mary had served her Sunday specialty: homemade ice cream and fresh peaches. Compared to her hot cooked meals, Soper concluded that “no better way could be found for a cook to cleanse her hands of microbes and infect a family.”

Soper searched New York for four months, looking for Mary Mallon. In his search, he identified eight families for whom Mary had cooked, going back several years. Seven families had outbreaks, with twenty-two sick and several deaths. 

In a few years, newspapers would dub Mary Mallon “Typhoid Mary”.

It took police officers, an ambulance, a female doctor, and a foot-chase over the backyard fence to finally bring Mary in for testing. Mary tried her best to resist, holding her stool sample as long as possible. Ultimately, nature called, and Mary tested positive for high levels of Salmonella. Completely and absolutely healthy, Mary denied ever being sick with Typhoid.

She was quarantined on a hospital island for two years, producing typhoid-positive samples the entire time. 

She sued the health department, lost, but was finally freed from the hospital in 1910. Mary agreed to check in regularly with the health department, and importantly, Mary agreed never to work as a cook again. 

After a while, Mary stopped checking in and, feeling fit as a fiddle, returned to cooking: for a hotel, a Broadway restaurant, a spa, and a boarding house.

In 1915, typhoid fever broke out in a New York maternity hospital. At least twenty-five nurses, doctors, and staff were infected, and two died. The cook was a woman named “Mary Brown” who, surprise, surprise, turned out to be Mary Mallon. 

Mary was again transferred to the quarantine island, where she lived until her death in 1932, adamant that she had never been sick with typhoid. 

Mary was the first known case of a healthy carrier in the United States. She was traced to the infection of at least 122 people, including five deaths. In 1907 alone, 3,000 New Yorkers were infected with typhoid, most likely due to Mary. 

Mary’s legacy as an asymptomatic carrier of a deadly disease has informed every widespread disease outbreak since. 

Forty percent of Covid-19 infections have no symptoms. A Boston homeless shelter had 147 infected residents, but 88 percent of them had no symptoms. A Tyson poultry plant in Arkansas had 481 infections, and ninety-five percent were asymptomatic. Prisons across multiple states found 96 percent of infected people were asymptomatic. 

A large number of infected but asymptomatic people is a good thing, of course, but that’s not the whole story. Apparently, seemingly healthy people are just as capable of carrying large viral loads and infecting others as are people with symptoms. 

Compounding the situation are the “super-spreaders”. Super-spreader events, where a single person infects a large number of people, are widely documented. 

The World Health Organization initially did not recommend population-level face masking, but changed their recommendation in June 2020 when the extent of transmission by asymptomatic individuals was confirmed. 

It wasn’t a flip-flop. With new data, science changes its mind. 

A poor immigrant with little education, Mary can possibly be excused for not understanding the nuances of being an asymptomatic carrier. 

But we should know better. When you wear a mask in public spaces, you are probably protecting yourself a bit. But mostly, you’re protecting everyone else in case you are one of the asymptomatic carriers. 

Love your neighbor as yourself.

A popular illustration of the day, depicting Mary cracking skulls like eggs into a frying pan.

******

And as You speak
A hundred billion creatures catch Your breath
Evolving in pursuit of what You said
If it all reveals Your nature so will I

(Hillsong United “So Will I“)

******