One of the largest outbreaks in a generation
The Times has a long crushing despair-inducing piece by Eli Saslow on vaccine denialism and the return of measles. Very worth reading.
Twenty-five years after measles was officially declared eliminated from the United States, this spring marked a harrowing time of rediscovery. A cluster of cases that began at a Mennonite church in West Texas expanded into one of the largest outbreaks in a generation, spreading through communities with declining vaccination rates as three people died and dozens more were hospitalized from Mexico to North Dakota. Public health officials tracked about 1,200 confirmed cases and countless exposures across more than 30 states. People who were contagious with measles boarded domestic flights, shopped at Walmart, played tuba in a town parade and toured the Mall of America.
But what frightened Kiley more than the potential spread was the severity of the disease: About one in five unvaccinated people with measles will be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one in 20 children contracts a secondary pneumonia infection. More than one in 1,000 dies. Measles stops spreading when 95 percent of a community is immune, but national vaccination rates for children have fallen to less than 92 percent. In parts of West Texas, they’ve dropped below 80.
Measles is no joke.
“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees. He tried to manage his symptoms at home with cod liver oil and vitamin D, supplements endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary. He isolated himself in the living room to avoid infecting his four children and coughed and dry-heaved his way through the night.
“I’m just trying to breathe at the moment,” he texted one relative.
One morning about a week into his illness, Carrollyn walked into the living room and saw Kiley lying on the couch. His head was almost purple. A rash was blooming across his chest, and his mouth was dotted with dozens of white sores. She tested his oxygen level. It read 85 percent — low enough to endanger his vital organs. She tucked the monitor away to keep Kiley from panicking. He was hazy and confused, so she helped him into a fresh shirt and drove him to the emergency room, where he was quarantined and given oxygen, breathing treatments and X-rays to monitor his stomach cramps.
Does that sound like fun?
For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it.
The vaccine was considered both safe and 97 percent effective by the Food and Drug Administration. For generations, every credible American health official had recommended the M.M.R. vaccine, to prevent measles, mumps and rubella, as a basic obligation to society. Almost all parents in Texas had consented to the recommended two doses for their children, effectively eliminating measles transmission within the United States. But that success also meant the disease had gradually become an abstraction, a distant threat. Only three Americans had died of measles since 2000, and Kennedy rose to political prominence as a vaccine skeptic. He testified to Congress about the risk of rare vaccine injuries, and later fired all 17 experts on a vaccine advisory panel. “People ought to be able to make the choice for themselves,” he said in a March interview on Fox News.
No, they oughtn’t. Not unless they plan to live in a sealed house for the rest of their lives. That’s because it’s not possible to make the choice just for oneself. The choice is also for everyone else.
And all the while, Edwards continued to release his weekly podcast, hosting a rotation of authors, doctors and activists who minimized the danger of measles and spoke instead about the benefits of being unvaccinated and the risks of rare vaccine injuries.
“The body’s designed to kill measles,” Edwards said, as it spread into New Mexico and Oklahoma.
“I would encourage you to seek a higher authority, a spiritual authority, and let peace guide you,” he said, as the disease stretched into Kansas and Nebraska.
“Don’t be scared of anything,” he said, when the total number of reported measles cases rose above 1,000, almost all among people who were unvaccinated, as the virus continued to spread in Colorado, Pennsylvania and finally into the remote corners of North Dakota, arriving in the state for the first time in 14 years.
There’s much more. There is no happy ending.
This sounds so familiar; the spread of COVID, the ‘let god handle it’, the refusal to vaccinate – we are a disease-ridden species (like most species) but we had managed to become less disease-ridden through health practices that included vaccines, but was light on prayer. It worked. Now we’re regressing.
I can almost understand why some members of the younger generations might have once been blasé about vaccines, having never been confronted with epidemics of disease before CoViD-19 thanks to the success of mass vaccination.
I don’t understand how they managed to retain their scepticism after 2020, nor how people my age can be anti-vaxxers. We grew up with regular outbreaks of disease. It was horrible to suffer through catching them, and horrible to go back to school afterwards and find out that some classmates were permanently missing. Some because they had lost sight or hearing, and had been transferred to specialised schools, some because the disease had killed them.
My response to people on Facebook declaring “We had those diseases, and we’re OK!” is “Those of us who didn’t survive don’t have Facebook accounts to tell us about it.”
I now wonder what would happen if a group of people got together and made In Memoriam FB pages for all the people , especially infants and children, who have died from outbreaks of disease for which there are now vaccines? Just a simple page with name, dates of birth and death, and a profile picture of the headstone on their graves? Of course, as anyone knows who has ever visited an older graveyard, the same headstone photograph could be used for several entries – I’ve encountered gravestones with the names of entire families who died within days or weeks of one another, parents and multiple children from newborn babies to teens.
tigger
I believe it was Paul Offit who once pointed out that there is a eugenics element to a lot of antivax ideology. Apart from the obligatory “natural good, artificial bad” fallacy, as well as conspiracy theories about nano-chips and mind control, there seems to be a common view of diseases as a rite of passage that we’re all “meant” to go through, and those who don’t make it had no business existing in the first place.
tigger, one of the exercises my students did (looking at population demographics) was to visit the cemetery and do a research project on changes in longevity. The ones who did the pre-1920 deaths would come back shocked. “I found an entire family where everyone died in a week.” Those were invariably during the early 20th century flu epidemic. “Wow, a lot of kids died before they were even a year old!”
The ones who did the later deaths found few to no children in their count. Not that children quit dying, it just became rare enough that a small random sample was less likely to pick up very many.
It would have been a good time to have the vaccine discussion with them…but I wasn’t permitted. It was considered ‘too political’. I did have that discussion during the immunology portion of my lecture, because somehow that was seen as appropriate to the curriculum. Strange how that goes, no?
I had measles when I was a kid. Horrible disease – I was very feverish and miserable. I remember crying out, “Please call the doctor” – we never saw doctors unless someone broke their arm, and we would drive to see them but he was summoned to my bedside. I think it took about a fortnight to get over it. Not as bad as the case described above but some inkling of it.