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08 - The Sound of Whooping Cough
16 Plays10 days ago
As of November 25, 2025, a third infant in Kentucky has died of whooping cough. So far this year, Kentucky has reported at least 566 cases. Texas has reported 3,500 cases so far this year. Falling vaccination rates are entirely to blame for this situation.
Most of what we hear from parents who are reluctant to agree that their children should be vaccinated comes from the fear that vaccines cause autism. Which could not be further from the truth. Yet - to admit you are wrong means a loss of identity as a true believer and loss of group inclusion, of a deeply held certainty about how the world works. So our tribal times now make more sense, where clearly false beliefs or conspiracy theories have become loyalty tests for group membership.
All of this leads me to ask - what has happened to rugged American individualism, the sharp and skeptical and realistic view of the world that has guided Americans for so long?
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Transcript
The Paradox of Whooping: Joy vs. Illness
00:00:09
Speaker
When we imagine crowds whooping at a sports event, we can hear a joyful shout, a yelping cry of happiness that the team has scored, a Hail Mary goal, long shot win, a brilliant technical move by a player, the three-point basket from center court of the basketball game.
00:00:42
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How on earth did we repurpose that verb, to whoop, to describe the sound a child makes when they suffer from pertussis, that we colloquially now call whooping cough?
Pertussis Outbreaks and Vaccine Rates
00:00:55
Speaker
This cough is the gasping, haunting, violent, painful spasm of a child who could die of a preventable bacterial infection. The pathogenic organism is the Bordetella pertussis bacterium,
00:01:11
Speaker
which secretes a small protein we call pertussis toxin. Pertussis typically begins like a mild respiratory infection, an occasional cough that progresses within one or two weeks to become a spasm, increasing in frequency and severity.
00:01:30
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The spasms come with a series of rapid coughs without taking a breath, followed by the characteristic whoop, a desperate effort to draw breath. the patient may become blue with hypoxia and vomiting may follow several spasms may occur successively within a few minutes leaving the patient exhausted as of november 25th 2025 a third infant in kentucky has died of whooping cough so far this year kentucky has reported at least 566 cases year
00:02:04
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texas has reported thirty five hundred cases so far this year Falling vaccination rates are entirely to blame for this situation.
The Evolution of Vaccines
00:02:16
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Smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine developed through the pioneering work of Edward Jenner in the late 18th century in England. The next routinely recommended vaccines were developed early in the 20th century.
00:02:28
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These included vaccines that protect against pertussis in 1914, diphtheria tetanus in 1938. ninety twenty six and tetanus in ninety thirty eight These three were combined in 1948 and are now given as the DTaP vaccine.
00:02:46
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When the polio vaccine was licensed in 1955, America celebrated and Jonas Salk, its inventor, became an overnight hero. In 1963, the measles vaccine was developed and by the late 1960s, vaccines were also available to protect against mumps, 1967, and rubella, or German measles, 1969.
00:03:10
Speaker
These three vaccines were combined into the MMR vaccine by Dr. Maurice Hilleman in 1971.
The Wakefield Effect on Vaccine Perception
00:03:21
Speaker
Most of what we hear from parents who are reluctant to agree that their children should be vaccinated comes from the fear that vaccines cause autism. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a GI specialist, not an immunologist or a pediatrician, published a paper in The Lancet, the British Journal, claiming that 12 young children develop mental disorders shortly after being immunized with the MMR vaccine.
00:03:50
Speaker
That study was poorly designed, lacked controls, and soon was fully retracted. Wakefield was found to have performed his research without ethical approval and did not disclose financial conflicts of interest, including that his research was funded by lawyers representing families who believed that the MMR vaccine had caused their children's autism and were preparing lawsuits against the manufacturer.
00:04:19
Speaker
and that Wakefield had filed a patent for an alternative measles vaccine. These are terrible conflicts of interest. Wakefield's medical license was suspended after a disciplinary hearing.
CDC, Cognitive Dissonance, and Vaccine Myths
00:04:33
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Nevertheless, the damage was done, so much so that the CDC website, as of a few days ago, now contains false information suggesting vaccines cause autism.
00:04:47
Speaker
This official U.S. government statement is dangerous misinformation and misrepresents the many large studies that included millions of children and were performed since the Wakefield disaster, showing no evidence of any link to autism.
00:05:06
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This means that the CDC can no longer be trusted as an objective source of information about the best scientific consensus on any issue. The origin of this crisis is best understood not as a medical controversy, but as a social phenomenon.
00:05:22
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The sociologist Leon Festinger and colleagues published an important book in 1956 called When Prophecy Fails, exploring cognitive dissonance between belief and actual facts or events.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Belief Persistence
00:05:36
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In that book, a group of people with an apocalyptic belief expected that they would be rescued from the Earth by aliens. But when it was disconfirmed, they kept trying all sorts of qualifiers and explanations for why nothing had happened.
00:05:53
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The sociological interest is in how far people will go in the face of obvious facts to defend a belief that's beginning to look ridiculous. The answer is surprisingly far because of cognitive dissonance reduction.
00:06:08
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To admit you are wrong, means a loss of identity as a true believer and loss of group inclusion of a deeply held certainty about how the world works.
Identity Politics vs. Facts in Health Decisions
00:06:21
Speaker
So our tribal times now make more sense where clearly false beliefs or conspiracy theories have become loyalty tests for group membership.
00:06:36
Speaker
Political parties have descended into this arena where identity is more important than policy, where health itself is being sacrificed and the cause of belonging to the group.
American Individualism vs. Authority Dependence
00:06:50
Speaker
All this leads me to ask, What has happened to rugged American individualism? The sharp and skeptical and realistic view of the world that has guided Americans for so long.
00:07:03
Speaker
Oh, all right. Yeah, the strong man will do your thinking for you.
00:07:19
Speaker
You've been listening to The Fifth Column, a series of podcasts documenting the intersecting stresses of our time. I'm Gerry Dennis. Please tune in again soon.