PORTLAND, ME – Local anti-vaccine cult member Anik Furlong was confused recently when presented with some simple math about a mumps outbreak.
“I just don’t get it. A bunch of pro-vaccine, sciency type sites were saying that unvaccinated kids were more likely to be infected, but there were more vaccinated than unvaccinated cases in the outbreak. It makes no sense” said an exasperated Furlong.
The outbreak in question happened last year in northern Washington. There was an outbreak of mumps (14 cases) in an elementary school with 300 students. Almost all 300 students were vaccinated (282) with only 18 students being unvaccinated. Of the 14 cases, 8 were fully vaccinated and 6 were unvaccinated. Using some simple math, we see that the attack rate among vaccinated kids was 2.8% (8/282) and a whopping 33.3% (6/18) in the unvaccinated kids.
When presented with this information, Mrs. Furlong was quite confused. “I don’t understand any of this fancy math, all I know is that there were 8 vaccinated kids and only 6 non-vaccinated kids that got sick.”
Repeated attempts to explain this to several anti-vaccers resulted in much of the same responses.
“You guys need to bend the stats to make it look like vaccines work, we have simple math on our side. If your vaccines work so well, why did MORE vaccinated kids get sick? (laughing) You guys need to wake up and do some research” said anti-vaccine mathematician George Grant.
