Why do some people post about a troubling or unethical history associated with the measles vaccine?
The usual suspects…
Is There Anything Unethical About the History of the Measles Vaccine?
And of course, most of it is pure anti-vaccine propaganda.
Wait, did I say that most and not all of it is pure anti-vaccine propaganda?
Unfortunately, yes.
Before our modern era with ethical guidelines of testing and experimentation and informed consent laws, researchers did sometimes use people who did not or could not consent in their trials. This includes institutionalized patients in orphanages, schools, and hospitals. While their parents, when available, typically consented, many felt that it was coerced and not real informed consent as we see it now.
From this, though, we got modern ethical guidelines, including informed consent rules, the use of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to review research protocols, and regulatory oversight.
What else?
“In 1960 an epidemic of measles swept through Willowbrook, leaving 60 children dead. The studies that we initiated with the live attenuated measles vaccine developed by Dr. John Enders and his colleagues culminated in the eradication of measles from the institution by the end of 1963.”
Saul Krugman
Another problem was all of these children left to get sick in places like Willowbrook!
Experimenting on them was wrong, but we should not have been institutionalizing so many children and adults at the time either.
And that leaves us with the pure propaganda that anti-vaccine folks are pushing as ethical issues with the measles vaccines, such as that:
researchers injected live measles virus under the skin of children in the Lepow study - they didn’t, he used an attenuated virus! That the children developed a vaccine-associated fever or rash doesn’t mean that they were injected with the measles virus or that they developed measles. It is simply symptoms of an immune response to the attenuated virus.
children were given a live viral vaccine that wasn’t attenuated - this is a claim from Suzanne Humphries, who has said that the original measles vaccines included a “non-attenuated live measles vaccine” and “a live, semi-attenuated measles vaccine,” neither of which is true.
In reality, we had:
1963 - a killed/inactivated measles vaccine that was withdrawn in 1967 because it sometimes caused atypical measles
1963 - an attenuated measles vaccine based on the Edmonston B strain
1965 - a further attenuated measles vaccine based on the Schwarz strain
1968 - a further attenuated measles vaccine based on the Moraten/Enders-Edmonston strain, which is the vaccine we use today as part of the MMR vaccine
And no, that the vaccines became further attenuated doesn’t mean that the previous one was only semi-attenuated. They were less attenuated, but they still didn’t cause anyone to develop wild-type measles. They caused more symptoms, but they did not get anyone else sick, like they would if they had actually developed a measles infection.
Now, how about we discuss the ethics of pushing misinformation about vaccines?