Political battles over vaccinations leave some children unprotected.
Drought disaster declared The Obama administration last week declared a natural disaster in Washoe, Clark and 10 small counties in Nevada as a result of the drought. This makes farmers and ranchers eligible for low interest emergency loans, which they may need because they face reductions in irrigation. But then, so are ranchers and farmers in the counties not designated as disaster areas—Elko, Eureka, Lincoln, Storey and White Pine. A prepared statement by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack read, “Our hearts go out to those Nevada farmers and ranchers affected by recent natural disasters.” VILSACK Similar drought declarations affected more than a thousand counties in 26 states. In a prepared statement on an Idaho drought declaration, Vilsack said, “Our hearts go out to those Idaho farmers and ranchers affected by recent natural disasters.”
Angle aims at GOP leaders Sometime-Republican Sharron Angle is planning to police who can and cannot be a Republican. In a mailing to her political action committee contributors, Angle wrote that she will try to “remove those Republican imposters. ... These ‘Republicans In Name Only’ have infected all corners of government and are capable of even more damage than Democrats, because a RINO can’t be trusted to do the right thing, ever.” In 2014, Angle’s PAC raised $474,270 and paid out $513,976. “Yes, Republicans won last year, but do you have faith that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell won’t cave to the president on tough issues like illegal immigration, the funding of Obamacare, and cutting the outrageous ANGLE government spending?” the mailing read further. “We don’t either. That’s why we are planning an all out assault on the weak-kneed, spineless Republican imposters who have infected our beloved Party.” Angle is a Republican-turned-Independent American-turned Republican again. The Independent American Party was formed as the Nevada arm of George Wallace’s 1968 third party. Former GOP state chair Bob Cashell has said it is people like Angle who are RINOs. “These people claim to be Ronald Reagan conservatives, and they’re not,” he said in 2010. “I knew Ronald Reagan. He asked me to join the Republican Party when I was a conservative Democrat, and I’m still a conservative Republican. ... The RINOs are the other people to the far, far right.” During a 2012 campaign in Pennsylvania, Angle attacked GOP U.S. Senate candidate Steve Welch, who was supported by the state Republican Party, for party switching. Angle has been a member of the Nye County School Board and the Nevada Legislature. In 2010, with the help of Democrat Harry Reid, she won the Republican U.S. Senate nomination. In that race, Angle was one of the lesser candidates in the GOP primary running against frontrunner Sue Lowden. Reid wanted to run against one of the minor candidates, and his campaign launched fierce attacks on Lowden in advance of the primary. Lowden’s numbers started falling and Angle was the beneficiary, winning the primary with 40.09 percent of the vote. Reid then won a comfortable 5.74 margin over Angle.
—Dennis Myers
8 | RN&R |
FEBRUARY 12, 2015
Bad information spreads like disease Vaccinating parents stay mostly silent in face of anti-vaccine movement State legislators last week were briefed by state health officials on vaccination issues, but say they plan no action by to deal with a decline in the number Dennis Myers of parents getting their children inoculated against various diseases. Assembly Health and Human Services Committee chair James Oscarson said the session with health officials was held mainly to let the public know that legislators are “paying attention.”
“They grew up in an era when there were no deadly diseases—because they’d been vaccinated.” Jim Richardson Sociologist One measure, Senate Bill 117, has been introduced that would expand vaccination requirements to include inoculations for human papillomavirus and meningitis. From Vermont to California, state legislators are considering measures to deal with the failure of a minority of parents to have their children vaccinated. Repeal of religious and personal belief exemptions are being proposed in Maine and California legislatures, while those in Montana and New York are considering making those exemptions more permissive. A surprise was that Mississippi has
the best record of vaccinations—99.7 percent in both public and private schools. Only 140 students are not inoculated. The state has a very strict law that allows few exemptions— though local legislators are now trying to water that law down. By contrast, Nevada has a 90.4 percent vaccination rate, according to the legislative briefing last week. In 2010, 9,120 cases of pertussis—whooping cough—were reported in California, the highest number in 63 years. Initially this outbreak was attributed to factors like “waning immunity of acellular pertussis vaccines and other explanations including large birth cohorts of susceptible infants, increased detection of cases, and the possibility of genetic changes in circulating strain,” but a 2013 study in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics later found that “communities with large numbers of intentionally unvaccinated or undervaccinated persons can lead to pertussis outbreaks. In the presence of limited vaccine effectiveness and waning immunity, sustained community-level transmission can occur, putting those who are most susceptible to communicable diseases, such as young infants, at increased risk.” Whooping cough, which can cause death, had declined to 20 or 30 cases in the nation each year. In Nevada alone in 2013, there were 22 cases.
The same study of the California outbreak, using census tracts, found that a failure of parents to vaccinate children happens most often in upscale households. “In California, both NME [nonmedical exemptions from vaccination requirements] and pertussis clusters were associated with factors characteristic of high socioeconomic status such as lower population density; lower average family size; lower percentage of racial or ethnic minorities; higher percentage of high school, college, or graduate school graduates; higher median household income; and lower percentage of families in poverty.” While there is considerable folklore about the “dangers” of vaccination, there is no scientific basis for it.
Self-deception Why do people buy into dumb stuff? One reason appears to be that the virtue of listening to all points of view seems to be passing away right before our eyes. In some cases, that means people are never exposed to accurate information—because they shield themselves from it. Nevada sociologist James Richardson said self-reinforcing “enclaves,” whether cultural, political or religious, are developing in society. They create their own stores of information. “They get caught up in some cultural subgroup and they can kind of self-actuate there,” said Richardson. “You get caught up in the group and you only talk to them, and they only talk to you, and they reinforce each other’s beliefs. You get in this culde-sac or enclave and build up these walls and it only gets broken down if something dramatic happens, like this [vaccination crisis].” Parents who do vaccinate but remain silent—though they represent the majority—have a role in the spread of misinformation. In an interview last week with the Reno Gazette-Journal, Immunize Nevada director Heidi Parker said, “The small amount that don’t believe in that [vaccination] are very vocal, while most parents who are vaccinating don’t speak up. It’s important for those parents to speak up and show their support for vaccinating. We need those positive voices.” “If you’re satisfied, you don’t speak up,” Richardson said. “They’ve got other things to worry about until somebody really hits them between the eyes with a two by four, and they find their kids’ playmates are unvaccinated. … Then they become alarmed that their kids are having to interact with unvaccinated children.”
