The Internet Backs This Doctor Who Gave Anti-Vax Friend A Reality Check After She Wouldn't Stop Calling Her About Her Sick Kids

Being a doctor must be both rewarding and frustrating. On the one hand, you save lives and help people maintain their health. On the other, you give people clear, scientifically-backed advice and watch them ignore it. Unfortunately, medical advice is not something anyone should just disregard, but often people find that out too late.

Recently, a doctor asked the internet if her actions towards a friend were maybe too unsympathetic. She received a call in the middle of the night from their friend, whose kid had developed a high fever. The problem began when the doctor asked her friend if she had vaccinated her child as recommended.

The doctor’s unhappiness is in many ways justified. Polio has been around since ancient Egypt, as there are depictions of children and wealthy people using canes to help them move about. If you are wondering why canes are relevant to polio, wonder no more. A common sign of the disease is weakness in the legs, or, more specifically, one leg. The actual death rate is not that high, but can still have long-term effects on otherwise healthy individuals. Children in particular are at risk.

Not knowing the symptoms of polio is actually a pretty good metaphor for how effective modern medicine has been at eradicating it. First and foremost, we have to thank vaccines. In the case of polio, vaccination is 99% effective at preventing the disease. What about that one percent, you might ask. Well, like most similar diseases, it needs a host. If you remove 99% of the population as potential hosts, a disease will struggle to spread. This is how polio, among others, became extinct in the developed world. As the OP mentioned, there are now groups of people who seem to believe that any vaccination will cause harm. And thus, a dead disease is now around again.

The idea to dose oneself with a small amount of something to become immune is actually older than you might think. There is some evidence that in 10th-century China, people would inhale small amounts of powdered smallpox material to build immunity to it. Modern researchers believe this strategy could actually work, though our smallpox vaccines are much more efficient. In Europe, people would ‘exchange’ smallpox through small cuts on their arms. So just count your blessings when it comes to doctors' needles, it could be worse!

Modern vaccines also help focus your body's defense on relevant threats. Bill Bryson, author of “A Short History of Nearly Everything” writes “Your body holds lots of different varieties of defensive white cells—some ten million types in all, each designed to identify and destroy a particular sort of invader. It would be impossibly inefficient to maintain ten million separate standing armies, so each variety of white cell keeps only a few scouts on active duty. When an infectious agent—what’s known as an antigen—invades, relevant scouts, identify the attacker and put out a call for reinforcements of the right type.” So rest easy, knowing that your body is constantly training defenses to protect you.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation mixed with general medical ignorance out there. While some are just skeptics, there are movements that actively try to limit or prevent vaccines from reaching people. In 2019, the WHO listed ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as a major health threat in the future. At the time, outbreaks of previously eradicated diseases (like polio) were cited as the main issue, but 2020 would prove the WHO even more correct.