Can Growing Fear of Vaccines Lead to Other Medical Misconceptions?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Rodney Rohde
In this program:
Vaccine fear can have a snowball effect. Medical laboratory scientist Dr. Rodney Rohde discusses how vaccine fear, hesitancy, and misinformation have led to real-world impacts on people, domestic animals, and overall public health.
Transcript
Interviewer:
So I feel like there's actually starting to be a trickle effect of just, "Oh, I don't trust this vaccine. And I don't trust this, and I don't trust that." So do you think that the growing fear of vaccines, especially in this COVID era, can kind of lead to more misinformation and lead to more misconceptions for people when it comes to other vaccines and other medical resources?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah, it's a really big problem. And again, I appreciate the question. Let me state a recent study that I was interviewed for, this really blew my mind, yet it makes sense. This study, and I can't remember it off the top of my head right now, but I was interviewed because I've been working in rabies, again for 30-plus years, either in diagnostics or research. And the article was looking at what about animal vaccinations and what this study showed, believe it or not, was that in areas around the country where you had high pockets of, not only vaccine hesitancy, but true anti-vaxxers, they were stopping vaccination of their animals. So now you have this kind of trickle-down effect, if you will, where they stop vaccinating themselves, perhaps their family members, and now they're going to stop…
Interviewer:
Everybody.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Vaccinating their domestic dogs and their domestic cats and their livestock for rabies or other types of wildlife infections. This is science miscommunication at its best. It's so unfortunate because to your point, measles in Florida is just devastating, it's frustrating, it makes me angry at times, because we eliminated measles in 2000 in this country through vaccination, through MMR. We all know about the...I don't even like to bring it up sometimes, but the poor publication that linked measles to autism is completely false. The gentleman lost his medical license, it was a poorly designed, poorly designed with improper interpretation of the results, but the horse was out of the barn. And so that story continues to bleed across the Internet and social media. It's...
Interviewer:
Yeah. And I've seen a lot of those.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
…used by different groups really for public health misuse. And sometimes I think it's outright abuse when you do things like that, because what's happening is, our most vulnerable, whether it's infants or children, or others who have no ability to speak up and ask for a vaccine. And so they can't get it perhaps because their loved ones won't give it to them, and what a horrible horrible situation if that child ends up getting measles and loses their hearing or their life, because they didn't get a child an immunization. And it's totally preventable. And so I get frustrated, I get angry. I'm sure many of my colleagues would tell you that if you asked them, but we can't give up, we have to keep going forward, we have to keep preaching the gospel that vaccination is still the most effective way to prevent most of these types of diseases that we deal with.
And in some ways, I think we're a product of our own success. My grandmother lived to be 100 years old, and she not only lost a child but her other close friends lost children to polio, diphtheria, on and on. I mean, they threw ticker tape parades when they found the polio vaccine. And so I just think because we've eliminated and are reduced some of these diseases, and then the unfortunate events where people have started seeing some vaccine side effects or some cases of problems and they do occur, I'm not saying they don't, but they've blown that up to the point where people are not taking them anymore. And...
Interviewer:
…and realistically we need to weigh the pros and cons. And it's...
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
A lot more cons without it...
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Yeah. And it's just really a complex topic.
And it's a difficult one sometimes to talk about, but I just think sometimes that the community public health is not happening anymore. People don't think about why it's so important to immunize yourself, because you're helping protect people who have cancer and infants and people who have organ donations and the elderly. And so it's not just about you, it's about the community and the world you live in, and so I think we need to get back to spreading that message that it's all for one or one for all, right? We really need that attitude again, where we're helping each other, and vaccination is helping your neighbor, there is no doubt.
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