Given that our bizarre medical spending practices could doom the U.S., it feels strange to write about this topic as a participant-observer.  So let me state upfront: I tried!  I argued with my medical care providers for several minutes, trying to keep them from wasting money.  I used logic.  I cited evidence.  I lost the argument.  They stuck to their position with the unwavering intransigence of bureaucratic rule-followers.

They were probably right to ignore me.  If a bigwig in a suit writes guidelines saying, “Do it this way,” a nurse or doctor might be fired for doing things differently.

The background: many people in my hometown recently contracted mumps.  Those who work with young people were instructed to get a “mumps titer” — this means measuring the concentration of mumps antibodies in a person’s blood — and those with low readings would be told to get vaccinated.

Sounds sensible enough.  But the titer is more expensive than the vaccine, and we have the vaccine in abundance, so I went in and asked them to just vaccinate me.  Yes, I was vaccinated already as a child, but it doesn’t hurt to get a booster.

They refused.  It’s a live vaccine, see?  To vaccinate you, they inject the actual virus.  The goal is to produce a “subclinical infection.”  But some adults have an adverse reaction — they get sick.  To minimize risk, our health care provider wanted to vaccinate only those people who seemed to need it.

The problem with this logic is fairly clear — although some people may get sick from the vaccination, the people who get sick are going to be those who were not yet immune.  By screening people with high titers, the total number of patients suffering an adverse reaction won’t go down at all.

The faulty logic would be problematic even if the mumps titer was a good assay.  But it’s not.  It’s fairly well known that it produces many false negative results — people who appear not to be immune to mumps, but are.  According to my health care provider’s policy, many people who are already immune to mumps will be vaccinated again.

This is fine from a health perspective, of course.  A second immunization will not hurt.  These people are very unlikely to get sick from the attenuated virus.  The only problem is that money was wasted on the titer.

Worse, common titer assays have a fairly high false positive rate: that is, people who appear to be immune, but aren’t.  Under my health care provider’s plan, these people won’t be vaccinated.  Now, these are people who might get sick from the vaccine — but they’d get much sicker if exposed to the actual virus.  If they’re not vaccinated, they’ll be left at high risk.

Compared to simply vaccinating everyone, testing everyone by mumps titer costs somewhere around twice as much.  Add in the number of vaccines that have to be given after the tests and the plan is even more expensive — even if everyone in the population already is immune to mumps and you’re only giving booster shots to those with false negatives, that could easily be twenty percent or more.  If you’re dealing with a mixed population where some people aren’t immune, the outlook is worse.  Then you’re also risking that someone with a false positive result, whom you decline to vaccinate, gets sick.  Mumps can make you very sick, especially adults.  It can cause brain inflammation — my father, who contracted mumps as a child, needed a spinal tap to get through it.  A scary procedure.  Much more expensive than the vaccine.

(Well, a spinal tap now is much more expensive than the vaccine now.  For my father to have been vaccinated, someone would have had to build a time machine and launch the shot into the past.  Time travel takes huge amounts of energy & is rather more expensive than a spinal tap.)

Nobody at my health care clinic was convinced.  They were adamant.  No vaccine without phlebotomy!

At least the universe has a sense of humor.  After all that, of course my titer would be a false negative.  Their money wasted, they called me back and had me get the unnecessary shot.  Just like I’d requested from the beginning.