THE MEASLES SCARE
February 10, 2015
The current debate in the US
over whether to require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against measles omits
mention of medical consensus on the vaccine’s efficacy. One dose lowers your chances of infection to
5%; both doses lower the odds significantly further; and those who get measles,
including those who get one dose within 3 days of infection, get a relatively mild
bout of the disease. If you are in a
community where 90 percent of your fellows are vaccinated, the risk virtually
goes to zero.
In sum, those who are not
vaccinated pose virtually no threat to those of us who are. Where most of us are vaccinated, the risk even
to those of us who are not is low, and the illness is treatable. I hate to see unvaccinated children be
punished by keeping them out of daycare and school (ironically denied the
chance to build their natural immunity with other children), especially when
unvaccinated children pose virtually no threat to those who are. Whatever the personal wisdom of getting
vaccinated might be, turning the measles outbreak into a public health matter
is one more symptom of our cultural tendency to treat social problems as
problems of identifying and correcting offenders. Love and peace, hal
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