{"id":7917,"date":"2018-03-27T11:05:58","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T19:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7917"},"modified":"2018-04-11T08:30:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T16:30:24","slug":"riding-the-tiger-or-flirting-with-the-antivaxxers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7917","title":{"rendered":"Riding the Tiger: or, Flirting with the Antivaxxers."},"content":{"rendered":"
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[<\/a>PreProda:<\/strong> Yeah, after some really enlightening discussion in the Comments section, I’m walking back about 90% of this post. But I’m leaving it posted both because the comments are<\/em> so interesting, and as a kind of historical artefact to remind me of what happens when I don’t take the time to think things through.]<\/p>\n

[Proda: <\/strong>OK, now I’m having third<\/em> thoughts, since a big chunk of the following argument derives from a) a discussion conducted over too many beers and b) my apparently-erroneous belief that flu vaccines have grown less effective over time. In fact, they apparently were never<\/em> very effective. For details, check out the mea culpa down in Comment 43<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

I’m having second thoughts about vaccination. [Update: But not just<\/em> vaccination. See coda.]<\/p>\n

Not because of autism or mercury or any of that Gwyneth Paltrow bullshit. Not even because I think vaccination is a bad idea\u2014 at this stage at least, we pretty much have to stick with the programs.<\/p>\n

I am wondering, though, if it might have been a bad idea to have started down this road in the first place.<\/p>\n

It all comes down to beers and budworms.<\/p>\n

Beers. I had lunch the other day with my favorite Cassandra and fictionalized antihero, Dan Brooks. He drops through every now and then in the course of his travels, usually bearing bad news. This time was no different; we talked about the future, and the increasing statistical likelihood that by mid-century we’ll have lost both half the world’s species and half the world’s human population (not that one of those things is any great loss). We talked about Cape Town, and Lincoln, and LA\u2014 all those places where local water wars are just around the corner. The imminent draining of the Great Lakes to water the gardens of millionaires in Palm Springs. The near-ubiquitous use of mouth guards by climate-change scientists. And by the way, have you heard the news? Cholera’s moved back into Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dan’s an evolutionary biologist. He takes the long view. (When I pointed out the obvious fact that only a few weedy, super-resilient species are likely to survive the Anthropocene, he shrugged and said “So what? Recovery after every<\/em> major extinction event starts with only a few weedy species, and they’re always enough to get us back up to high biodiversity in only ten or twenty million years.”) He’s also a parasitologist: comfortable talking about epidemiology, the parameter values of the rolling pandemics that’ll start hollowing out our urban centers sometime in the next ten or twenty years. My own background (putting aside the marine mammal thing) is more along the lines of general ecology\u2014 so when Dan started talking about outbreaks and countermeasures it was ecology, not epidemiology, that clicked.<\/p>\n

“You’re talking about the spruce budworm,” I said.<\/p>\n

A quick backgrounder for those who weren’t around in the back half of the Twentieth Century: the spruce budworm is a kind of caterpillar that wreaked havoc on coniferous forests throughout eastern Canada from the sixties at least through the eighties (it may be wreaking still for all I know, but I unfriended the little beggars once I left grad school). The logging industry of the time, as is the wont of logging industrialists everywhere, responded to the infestation by spraying the shit out of the forests with chemical insecticides. The budworm (as is the wont of fast-breeding life-forms<\/em> everywhere) counter-responded in three ways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Most of them died.<\/li>\n
  2. The few who didn’t bred back an army of Mk-2 budworms who weren’t quite as easily impressed by malathion.<\/li>\n
  3. They cranked up their reproductive rate to compensate for increased mortality.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Before long we were faced with a budworm population that we could keep sort of<\/em> under control, but only if we never stopped spraying. What had once been a purely intermittent event was now a continual, low-level outbreak kept barely in check by pesticides. The moment we let up on the chemicals, those resistant, faster-breeding budworms would tear through the forest like a billion little chainsaws.<\/p>\n

    What Dan made me consider was the proposition that mass-vaccination programs have done pretty much the same thing to us.<\/p>\n

    For generations now, we’ve been vaccinating ourselves against (for example) the flu. It used to work really well; vaccination is just a way of programming the immune system with a target-lock for invaders, and it’s pretty easy to do that when all the invaders have a common immunological profile:<\/p>\n

    \"Innocent,<\/a>

    Innocent, naive virus.<\/p><\/div>\n

    Of course, the moment you do that, you’ve provoked a Red Queen<\/a> scenario. The flu doesn’t just sit there like a candyass: you target that peak long enough, it’ll diversify<\/em>:<\/p>\n

    \"Experienced,<\/a>

    Experienced, world-weary, 5th-degree-black-belt-don’t-fuck-with-me virus.<\/p><\/div>\n

    This is how you go from Praise Be It’s A Miracle Everyone Should Get This! <\/em>\u00a0to Well, <\/em>this year’s<\/em><\/a> vaccine <\/em>is only<\/em><\/a> about <\/em>20% effective<\/em><\/a> but you should get a flu shot <\/em>anyway because<\/em><\/a> we don’t know what else to recommend<\/em>. At the same time, vaccination has been protecting people with weak immune systems, people who would otherwise have died. (Of course that’s what we’ve been doing; that’s the whole damn point of vaccination programs.) But since we’ve so greatly reduced the selection pressure that would otherwise weed out the immunological weaklings, vaccinated populations have, over time, become inherently less resistant genetically to the bugs that vaccines protect them against. We’ve outsourced our immune response to the pharmaceutical industry.<\/p>\n

    Tl;dr? We’ve been making the disease stronger while making ourselves weaker at the same time. It’s the spruce budworm all over again.<\/p>\n

    And now, like the spruce budworm, we don’t dare stop<\/em> vaccinating. We’ve built such a tough suite of microbial motherfuckers that if we ever take our foot off the gas, they’ll tear through us like a brush fire. In terms of disease resistance, our genetic load is now far far higher than it would have been if we’d just let nature take its course a hundred years ago. Dan calls it riding the tiger<\/em>\u2014except we’re talking about a tiger that’s been pumped full of steroids since cub-hood, and a rider that’s turned into a 98-lb weakling in the meantime. It’s only a matter of time before that damn cat throws us off and has us for dinner.<\/p>\n

    I’m guessing this is partly where the rolling-pandemics-in-ten-years thing comes from. I don’t know what we can do about it at this point. I suppose we could try a CRISPR fix\u2014 engineer genetic resistance back into our species before it’s too late. But I don’t know how easy it’ll be to scale that (relatively new) technology up to species-wide deployment.<\/p>\n

    I suspect Dan’s right. Nature will take care of the problem as it always has. Although there’s one sliver of hope I might summon:<\/p>\n

    Far as I know, we still have spruce forests in New Brunswick.<\/p>\n

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    Coda:<\/strong> On second thought, I probably shouldn’t have limited this argument to vaccination; I should have explicitly included drug-based countermeasures as well.\u00a0 They’re different approaches\u2014 one targets the invader, the other reprograms the immune system\u2014 but in both cases, the next generation favors those who get around the countermeasures (either by being resistant to the drug, or having a shape that differs from the target profile programmed by the vaccine). Different tools, but same principle. That’s the point I’m making. I’m not actually confused about the difference between drugs and vaccines.<\/p>\n

    It’s just that drug-resistant diseases are old news, hardly worth the alarm. The idea that vaccines are subject to the same processes is one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight, but I’d never thought about it before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [PreProda: Yeah, after some really enlightening discussion in the Comments section, I’m walking back about 90% of this post. But I’m leaving it posted both because the comments are so interesting, and as a kind of historical artefact to remind me of what happens when I don’t take the time to think things through.] [Proda: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-evolution","category-in-praise-of-biocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7917"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7963,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions\/7963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}