For Kinch, human understanding of disease proceeds by gritty perseverance, flashes of insight, and a great deal of luck. Many are familiar with the discovery of penicillin, when Alexander Fleming inadvertently found his bacterial samples killed by the fungus Penicillium; similar stories are scattered throughout medical history. Kinch charts the steps through which humanity has come to understand and then defeat (through vaccination) diphtheria, cholera, rabies, and pertussis, or whooping cough—vaccines for which I administer regularly at my own clinic. I’m lucky enough to have never seen the first three diseases in the clinic, but pertussis, sadly, is now making a comeback as a consequence of dropping vaccination rates.
In Japan in 1947, 20,000 children died from pertussis; by 1972, thanks to vaccination, the figure was zero. Then in the winter of 1974–1975 there were two high-profile deaths following administration of the vaccine, and vaccination rates plummeted; by the end of the 1970s the disease had resurged, killing more than forty people a year in Japan. Similar adverse reactions meant that by the early 1980s, suing vaccine manufacturers had become big business in the United States, and company after company gave up production. In 1986 President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to protect companies against litigation, and simultaneously sowed seeds of distrust among parents that the government and Big Pharma had something to hide. That distrust paved the way for the MMR debacle that a 2011 paper in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy called “perhaps…the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years”; in 1998 the now discredited English physician Andrew Wakefield published a carefully selected series of medical studies of twelve children, associating MMR vaccination with autism. TheLancet eventually retracted the paper, but the damage was done.
Kinch estimates that measles has caused 200 million deaths over the last 150 years. I can’t help wondering if some of those children on Mary West’s headstone died of it. Vaccination with MMR results in a 99.99 percent reduction in cases, and 100 percent reduction in fatalities. In Ireland alone (with a population of 4.76 million), the drop in MMR vaccination between the publication of Wakefield’s paper and the year 2000 was estimated to have brought about more than a hundred hospitalizations and three deaths.