Anti-Vaxxers Being Super Weird About Tetanus Shots Now
A new 'that happened' genre has emerged.
Now that the anti-vaccine crowd has exhausted every possible conspiracy theory about the COVID shot, it seems they’re moving on to a new target — tetanus shots! You know, the thing that prevents you from dying if you step on a rusty nail?
To be fair, anti-vaxxers and anti-vaccine groups have been spreading misinformation about the tetanus shot since the 1990s, but many of those who only recently converted during COVID are just finding out about it now. And boy, are they are into it!
Naturally, this has resulted in the increased proliferation of the always popular “Can you believe I’m smarter than my doctor!?!?” social media posts.
Earlier this month, George Mason University economics professor, anti-education activist and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan shared his own experience with a doctor telling him he needed to get a tetanus booster.
“My doctor talked to me like a child when I refused a tetanus booster,” he wrote. “This disease kills about 2 Americans per YEAR!”
That’s true, and it’s true because people are vaccinated against it. Not because it’s not deadly. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control estimates “that tetanus causes 213,000 [to] 293,000 deaths worldwide each year, and that it is responsible for [five to seven percent[ of all neonatal deaths and [five percent] of maternal deaths globally.” It’s also obviously not the kind of thing where one is protected by herd immunity, because you get it from dirty wounds, not from other people.
In another posting that went viral, a mom totally owned her doctor by knowing way more about the tetanus shot than her doctor did. Except not!
Allow me to post the story in its entirety:
This is a story from a mom who took her child to the emergency room with a cut.
Doctor: "We're going to give her a tetanus vaccine."
Mom: "Really? What brand and configuration did you have in mind?"
Doctor: "Just Tetanus."
Mom: "You mean the DTaP?"
Doctor: "Well, yes."
Mom: "So, you want to give my child a vaccine for 3 diseases when you're only concerned about one?"
Doctor: "It's the only way it comes." (wrong)
Mom: "So...how long will it take for the vaccine to help her create antibodies against tetanus?"
Doctor: "About 3 weeks."
Mom: "If this wound contains tetanus spores in the correct environment, how long before the spores start producing toxins causing lockjaw then death?"
Doctor: "Immediately."
Mom: "So you want to give her a vaccine that she won't mount an immune response with until about a week after she's dead, then?"
We left without the shot or TiG... Scares me that I have more information than a physician. It should scare you, too.
That is not what scares me.
What people are supposed to be getting if they get a tetanus shot is actually a tetanus booster. We’re all supposed to get a series of TDaP shots and boosters as babies/kids — which vaccinate them against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis/whooping cough — and boosters every 10 years once we are adults. We also get a booster if we get a cut that could cause tetanus and it’s been five or more years since we’ve gotten the shot to activate the antibodies that are already in our system.
Additionally, the booster is not a TDaP shot. It’s TD only, which makes sense because diphtheria is something you get from bacteria. The only reason anyone over the age of six would get a TDaP shot would be if they didn’t have it as a baby.
You would think this brilliant mom, who is so much smarter than a physician, would know all of this.
In one video that’s been making the rounds all year, “Dr.” Carrie Madej — who was forced to surrender her medical license last year — makes a variety of wildly untrue claims about tetanus and the TDaP shot. Madej shared that she had been curious since she was a teenager about why people needed to take the tetanus shot every 10 years.
“I ended up finding out, asking all of my attending physicians and infectious disease experts” she said. “We found out that the reason that they told us back then to take it was that when you are walking out in the yard, you have a rusty nail in your foot, the bacteria called tetanus gets in there and then within minutes to hours, not days or weeks, you could spasm so terribly that you would suffocate to death and fall on the floor and die, like within minutes or hours, which I have never heard of anyone dying that way.”
“So I have come to find out that is a lie, no one has died that way, nobody in the entire world.”
Well, of course not, because tetanus doesn’t actually kick in for a few days, up to a few weeks. People don’t die from it immediately, but, as mentioned above, they do die from it.
“The World Health Organisation and NIH have since 1972 been developing the tetanus vaccine as an abortion or sterilisation vaccine,” Madej claimed in another part of the video. “They have been putting the pregnancy hormone inside the tetanus vaccine, in that vial, and so every time you get it it is a cumulative response.”
She also claims that only families with private insurance, not Medicare, got the TDaP vaccine, and seems to suggest this was a plot to ensure poor people procreated more than rich people.
It will shock you to know that this is also not true. The Vaccines for Children program provides all vaccinations at no cost to infants who are on Medicaid.
Also, while researchers in India in the early 1990s did develop a combination contraceptive/tetanus vaccine, it was only tested on 148 volunteers and then abandoned because it was not very effective.
That’s it.
Like so much other nonsense, opposition to the tetanus vaccine is obviously not without its dangers. In 2019, an unvaccinated boy had to spend 57 days in the hospital after getting tetanus, racking up an $800,000 bill.
People can and do die from this all around the world, so as good as it may feel to totally “own” one’s doctor, it probably feels better to not have your kid die or spend months in a hospital over it.
Of COURSE that lady had that totally real and not made-up conversation with the ER doctor. That happens all the time. Just last week, I had a very pleasant conversation with Albert Einstein in which I told him all the mistakes I had found in his theory of relativity, and he very graciously agreed to correct them.
This is like saying that since relatively few people die by jumping out of planes parachutes are useless.