Opinion | The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable | Zeynep Tufekci. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/13/opinion/thepoint#measles-outbreak-vaccine
The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable
The World Health Organization has reported a “staggering” increase in the number of measles cases and deaths around the world. Millions of these victims are in poor countries and war zones, where vaccination programs have faltered because of the pandemic, violence or a lack of resources. In 2022, there were an estimated nine million measles cases globally, with 136,000 deaths.
Increasingly, measles outbreaks have been taking place in wealthier countries, largely because of vaccine refusal. This is a dangerous situation — and not just for the willfully unvaccinated.
Measles is airborne, wildly contagious and deadly. While the measles vaccine is greatly protective, losing herd immunity against the disease would result in many victims, and not just those who are willfully unvaccinated.
A small percentage of fully vaccinated people will develop breakthrough measles infections if exposed to the disease. While their cases may be mild, they can transmit the disease to others. That’s how measles will spread to infants too young to be vaccinated, older people and the immunocompromised. (In the United States, babies get vaccinated against measles between 12 and 15 months of age.) Because the vaccinated can have few to no symptoms, vaccinated breakthrough cases are easy to miss — until that potentially deadly transmission.
Some Republican politicians and state legislatures have toyed with removing or weakening vaccine mandates against measles, mumps and rubella in children. The number of Republicans who believe parents should be able to forgo vaccines for their children — even if that choice increases the risk of disease to others — is now up to 42 percent. That’s more than double the number before the pandemic, when the percentages were similar between the parties.
Make no mistake: If efforts to remove these mandates succeed, there will be more outbreaks. Many unvaccinated children will die horrible deaths, while the vaccinated will be largely spared. But many babies, grandparents and immunocompromised patients will get sick and die, too.
In a sane world, our country would allocate the resources to get vaccines to those in poorer countries and conflict zones and would refuse to budge on compulsory childhood vaccines. The alternative should be unthinkable.