Measles outbreak a grim reminder to trust science
We urge state lawmakers to make it more difficult for parents to get children exempted from immunization.
These are incredibly frustrating times for the acceptance of science.
We are still debating climate change — despite the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of it — when we should be enacting sweeping initiatives to counteract its human-made aspects. (The president is among those who don’t seem to understand the difference between weather and climate.)
Meanwhile, Fox News host Pete Hegseth said on the air Sunday, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” Hegseth used this “belief” to rationalize never washing his hands, Newsweek reported. Seriously, Pete? Which brings us to the ongoing measles outbreak, in which lives have been endangered around
Clark County, Washington — not far from the major population center of Portland, Oregon.
The reason for this terrifying epidemic? Clark County has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Washington at 78 percent of the kindergarten through high school population, The New York Times reports.
“Epidemiologists generally consider the threshold for preventing public measles outbreaks to be a vaccination rate of 93 percent or higher,” the Times added.
Dr. Alan Melnick, Clark County’s public health director, told the Times: “If you have a population that is unvaccinated, it’s like throwing a match into a can of gasoline. Measles is exquisitely contagious.”
How contagious? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the virus can survive for up to two hours in a room where an infected person has coughed or sneezed.
The CDC further states that “if one person has it, 90 percent of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected.”
Amid this growing concern, Washington state lawmakers are considering a bill that would, according to the AP, “remove parents’ ability to claim a personal or philosophical exemption to opt their school-age children out of the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.”
There is, frustratingly, serious opposition to that common-sense bill.
Though this is happening on the other side of the country, we should all be alarmed.
Quite simply, what is happening in Washington could happen here.
Pennsylvania and Washington are among the 18 states that allow philosophical exemptions to vaccinations.
In Lancaster County, 6.6 percent of students in kindergarten and seventh grade (the two grades measured), claimed a philosophical exemption from immunization for the 201718 school year, LNP’s Heather Stauffer reported last month. The overall number of exemptions — others coming on medical or religious grounds — was at 9.5 percent. The problem, as we wrote here last month, is that “in too many social circles, questioning vaccination has become the norm. Instead of heeding the advice of pediatricians — actual, trained medical professionals — too many parents are placing their trust in an anti-vaccination movement that relies on junk science.”
We must rely on proven science.
Once again, we urge our state lawmakers to make it more difficult for parents to get their children exempted from immunization. They must eliminate the philosophical exemption. And soon.
Dr. Alan Melnick, Clark County’s public health director, told the Times: “If you have a population that is unvaccinated, it’s like throwing a match into a can of gasoline. Measles is exquisitely contagious.”