There once was a man from Nantucket,
He had a really big penis.
I’m bad at limericks.
Instead, let me tell you the sad tale of Lymerix, the untimely death of the highly effective Lyme disease vaccine.
Today’s daily Moment of Science… killer headlines.
The earliest known case of Lyme disease was identified a few years ago. A long overdue autopsy of a 5,300 year old mummified body found in the Alps revealed DNA of the bacteria that causes the illness. There are written accounts starting in the 1600s describing an illness that was likely Lyme disease.
Through the first half of the twentieth century, doctors started to piece together the symptoms that accompanied a tick bite. The telltale red rash was given the name ‘erythema migrans’ in the early 1900s. By the fifties, they’d successfully treated it with penicillin in Europe. A dermatologist in Wisconsin recognized the bullseye mark in 1970 from the European literature, and knew to treat it with antibiotics. In 1975 in Connecticut, several cases first thought to be juvenile rheumatoid arthritis were identified as a cluster of tick borne illnesses.
These cases were in Lyme and Old Lyme, Connecticut, ergo.
Lyme disease super wicked sucks. Everyone knows the big sign: the red bullseye rash. But every case doesn’t present with it, and the other symptoms are far worse. The immediate aftermath of the tick bite can include fever, chills, headache, joint pain and body aches. It’s your basic “I want to crawl under a blanket and live on pedialyte” package. Weeks to months after infection, if untreated, Lyme patients can experience swollen joints, facial palsy, brain and spinal cord inflammation, severe headaches, and nerve pain.
So, Lymerix.
Released in 1999 by SmithKline Beecham (since merged with Glaxo to form GSK) Lymerix was about 80% effective at preventing Lyme disease.
Then some vaccine recipients were diagnosed with arthritis. One man reported developing rheumatoid arthritis six weeks after getting his second shot. Which was enough for some people to panic, because this was around the height of Jenny McCarthy’s tit’s medical knowledge.
Vaccinate a million random people, and over the course of a month life will happen to them. A certain percentage will have a heart attack, catch a cold, be diagnosed with depression. Some of them will get laid. A handful will decide “today’s the day I become a sword guy.”
If suddenly every person who received the vaccine became a sword guy, then you’d perhaps have reason for concern. But if it’s comparable to the non-vaccinated population, the sword guy life chose them.
Out of 1.4 million doses of Lymerix, there were 59 complaints of arthritis. Which was exactly what you’d expect, vaccinated or not.
So why can’t you get the vaccine today? Did the pharmaceutical giant capitulate to the angry mob? Did the FDA throw the vaccine onto the island of misfit drugs along with Vioxx and quaaludes?
Reality is so much more disappointing than that.
People just stopped buying it. It had never been mandatory on the vaccine schedule and demand only existed in a few areas of the country. The somewhat low level of adoption never recovered after the seed was planted in the public mind that it caused debilitating arthritis symptoms. There was no longer reason to make a vaccine that there was no demand for.
What killed Lymerix? Fear.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, begging that we stop letting idiots write the headlines on slow news days, lest it fucking kills us all.
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