Don’t believe the hype-odermic on vaccine

I never applied myself much to math unless it became critical.

Like learning how to use a plotting board in my lap when I was flying

a Navy airplane. Or learning the odds for hitting a 15 at the

blackjack table when the dealer was showing a 10. Especially, in

recent years, the latter.

So when Our Leader in Washington, D.C. told me that he thought it

wise for my own safety to get a smallpox shot -- and even got one,

himself, to demonstrate real leadership -- the first question I

considered was: What are the odds?

According to the Institute of Medicine, asked by the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention to investigate this problem, one or

two of every million people vaccinated for smallpox will die as a

result.

If these seem like odds you can live with, consider the next

sentence, which tells us that many more people will suffer serious

complications. And ponder the conclusion of the study that says: “The

smallpox vaccine may be the least safe vaccine ever used on a wide

scale.”

So I weighed this warning against the likelihood of one of Saddam

Hussein’s true believers getting himself dosed up with smallpox,

flying to John Wayne and embracing me at the airport before a net is

thrown over him. That scenario, which seems about as likely as the

mayor of Newport Beach nominating me for a Pulitzer Prize, clearly

offers better odds than the million-to-1 (or 2) that the vaccine will

do me in.

Just to make sure that the smallpox shot is indeed the greater

risk, I did some more research that only hardened my decision. At the

nation’s first inoculation site of health care workers, only four

physicians -- out of 20 members of the emergency team -- in the state

of Connecticut agreed to be vaccinated. At Cedars-Sinai Medical

Center in Los Angeles, only six of 26 doctors said they would

volunteer. Five hospitals in Los Angeles County have told health

officials they won’t participate when the inoculations begin because,

as one spokesperson put it: “We choose not to proceed based on the

threat analysis.”

Part of the opposition grows out of the government’s refusal to

create a compensation fund for people who miss work because of the

side effects of the vaccine.

But mostly it is because high-profile medical people are

questioning the validity of such mass inoculations at this time. A

San Fernando Valley pediatrician says he won’t take the shot or give

it to his two children because “the side effects are serious.” A

national public health official warns that a broad vaccination

program without taking the time to reevaluate “has the real potential

to do more harm than good.”

A study at the Rand Center for Domestic and International Health

Security concluded that vaccinating the public against smallpox would

kill more people than it saved in all but very large-scale

bioterrorist attacks. And the beat goes on. Watch the back pages of

your Los Angeles Times. While Bush is up front beating the war drums,

this kind of information has to be sought out.

I’ll have to admit there’s another reason I won’t be

participating. I don’t like to be force-fed either wars or smallpox

shots, and the smallpox program is moving along as relentlessly as

the war on Iraq, ignoring all the arguments that would cast it in

serious doubt. There is one important difference. The doubters don’t

seem to be making much of a dent in the rush to war, but we do have a

chance to bug out when it comes to getting a smallpox shot.

All this somehow made the death of cartoonist Bill Mauldin in

Newport Beach last week even more poignant.

We desperately need his voice in this country right now, and I

would have liked to see how his World War II GIs, Willie and Joe --

now elderly civilians -- would have dealt with the smallpox shots.

Mauldin’s obituaries properly stressed his wonderfully honest

depictions of life in the trenches, but not enough was said about his

equally honest, pungent and irreverent postwar political cartoons,

one of which I’ve had over my desk for many years.

You’ve probably read, as I have, newspaper coverage of the stream

of World War II veterans who visited Bill Mauldin at his Newport

Beach nursing home to express their gratitude for telling it like it

was. I clipped those stories to remind me how deeply I carried the

same feelings. He was 10 minutes away, and I never made it.

So Bill Mauldin’s last lesson for me was not to abuse time. Doors

open and invite us; if we wait too long to enter, they close. For

young people they might open again. For Bill Mauldin, they didn’t.

And so I can only express my thanks here -- and hopefully profit from

his last lesson.

I’d also like to suggest that the point Mauldin would have made

about smallpox shots if he were still cartooning was captured

precisely in a seven-word headline for an op-ed piece in the Los

Angeles Times. It read: “What We Need Is a Fear Vaccine.”

The only reason for getting a smallpox shot is fear of somehow

being infected by terrorists. Since the shots, themselves, carry some

risk, reasonable people will weigh the two risks before making a

decision. The government has made this decision for us without public

debate, so we have to dig out the pro and con arguments being offered

by private sources competent to judge these risks. In the process, it

might be useful to recognize that a war is easier to sell when the

fear factor is high.

I know that the odds favor hitting a 15 when the dealer is showing

a 10, even though my instincts tell me to pass. Sometimes I go with

my instincts in blackjack. But my math and my instincts are sending

the same message on a smallpox shot:

Don’t.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.