We live in an age of advanced scientific knowledge that produces vaccines that can ward off diseases such as measles, rubella, mumps and polio. We also live in an age when an increasing number of parents want the option of not vaccinating their children against these highly contagious and potentially fatal diseases.
Only 71% of people recently polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation believe that parents should be required to vaccinate their children to attend public schools, compared with 82% in 2019, the same as in 2016. This is akin to thinking that driving through a red light won’t have any consequences.
The poll reflects a small but growing percentage of parents choosing not to vaccinate their kids against preventable childhood diseases driven by a surge in misinformation spread online through social media. And it’s having a real effect on public health. A measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio, in November sickened 82 children, most of them unvaccinated and younger than 5. None of them died, but 32 were hospitalized.
Public health officials traced the outbreak to public locations including a dollar store, a church and two department stores. Measles is highly contagious and can live in the air for two hours after an infected person leaves, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, about 40 years after the live measles vaccine was first licensed. But confidence in immunizations has been waning, and this is not the first outbreak of measles in the United States in recent years. The CDC reported 1,274 individual cases of measles in 31 states in 2019, by far the greatest number since 1992. Many of those cases were connected to an outbreak in late 2018 and early 2019 among New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community, which had low vaccination rates.