Why Public-Health Officials Would Really Like It if You’d Vaccinate Your Child for Measles

“We have a very simple tool to prevent a very serious disease.”
Why PublicHealth Officials Would Really Like It if Youd Vaccinate Your Child for Measles
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On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control said the emerging measles outbreak in the U.S. has now spread to at least 17 states, with at least 141 people diagnosed with the highly contagious and sometimes deadly disease.

Those numbers will likely increase; experts were still examining some potential cases at the time of this writing. As the virus’s spread continues to spark a new national conversation about vaccines (and some truly puzzling contributions from certain politicians to it), it is easy to miss two central facts: the United States’s measles vaccination rate has held constant at about 92 percent for the past few years, and the Centers for Disease Control does not currently believe there’s a significant, nationwide dip in measles vaccination rates.

Those numbers put parents who have opted out of the measles vaccine for their children because they believe that is dangerous, and may cause mental illness, squarely in the minority. One might be forgiven for not realizing just how small of a minority, given the airtime those views have received by way of certain celebrities in past years, and their recent surprise appearance on the national political stage. Perhaps emboldened by reports of anti-vaccine parents in Republican enclaves like Orange County, California, earlier this month, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kentucky senator Rand Paul, both likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates, chose to emphasize a parent’s right to choose whether or not to vaccinate their children.

Christie’s staff quickly released a statement saying the governor believes parents should vaccinate their children, but Paul, a medical doctor who went so far as to say he knows of “many” cases in which healthy children developed “profound mental disorders” after receiving a vaccine, was a bit more resolute.

So, faced with an anti-vaccine minority so effective in spreading pseudoscience or fearmongering that is now getting potential presidential play, what’s a public-health official to do? Despite witnessing an outbreak of a disease that, medically, should no longer spread within the United States, experts with whom spoke this week refrained from expressing outrage or frustration with parents who elect not to vaccinate their children.

“I think we would just use the word ‘concern,’” said Dr. Jane Seward, the deputy director of the Division of Viral Disease at the C.D.C.’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease. “There’s a lot of misinformation on the Internet, and it’s hard for parents to know who to believe, so that’s why we say, if they have a question, they should go to their trusted health-care provider.”

There is, of course, an incredibly effective vaccine for measles, and the domestic, sustained transmission of measles from one patient to another had once been declared eliminated in the United States. It’s believed that between 90 to 95 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated with two doses to maintain what’s called herd immunity, or essentially full protection. That’s a pretty high benchmark, one that’s predicated on the incredibly contagious nature of measles, and one that the U.S. would still seem to be within range of.

As public-health officials note, however, herd immunity on a national scale will not help a school, for example, at which a significant number of students are not vaccinated. That’s why while the C.D.C. does not believe there’s been a significant decline in vaccination rates, granular developments can have an outsize public-health impact. At least 113 people who contracted measles in the recent outbreak are linked to one that began at California’s Disneyland, the C.D.C. said on Tuesday.

As with any vaccine, medicine, or treatment, adverse complications do sometimes occur after a child receives the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. Approximately 1 in 3,000 cases can develop febrile seizures, a concerning but generally not life-threatening occurrence, said Dr. Cristina Cassetti, a program officer with the Acute Viral Diseases Program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. Fevers, rashes, and other minor complications can also occur, but more severe adverse effects happen on the order of one in a million administrations, Dr. Cassetti said.

“Now, compare these numbers to the people who die of measles,” Dr. Cassetti added. “One to three people out of every 1,000 people who get measles die of it. Compare one to three in a thousand to one in a million people who develop severe complications, and this is how you make your medical decisions.”

Dr. Cassetti emphasized that the medical study that linked the measles vaccine to autism has long been disproven and retracted by the journal in which it was published (the researcher who authored it also lost his license). “It goes beyond science at some point, and it becomes part of common knowledge, which is hard to convince people is not true,” she said.

There are always individuals who cannot be vaccinated for medical purposes (mostly infants and patients who are sick with certain illnesses or receiving certain medical treatments). Vaccinating one’s child, then, is a decision made for two reasons: to protect the child from contracting measles in the event of exposure, and helping to maintain herd immunity and protect those who cannot be vaccinated.

Before the measles vaccine was developed in 1963, the disease killed around 500 children, and left 50,000 hospitalized, per year, Dr. Seward, a 19-year veteran of the C.D.C., told

As Dr. Seward put it, “There is a very good reason the vaccine was developed.”

While some politicians and anti-vaccine activists have tried to pin the blame for the outbreak on undocumented immigrants or tourists who bring measles with them from foreign countries, both the C.D.C. and N.I.H. point out that measles’s existence around the world is a reason to vaccinate children in the United States.

“Measles is everywhere in the world, so we’ve never not been at risk of having it in this country . . . most of the time by our own residents who travel while not protected” Dr. Seward said.

“For measles, again, it’s very easy, because we have an extremely effective vaccine,” Dr. Cassetti said. “For other infections, it’s not easy at all. This is kind of a low bar.”