Time to protect our children’s health

Amid the uproar over a court challenge to New York state’s decision to repeal religious objections to vaccines, a key fact seems to be getting lost: We are far better off thanks to the effectiveness of vaccinations and because most people do not resist getting them.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

In the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year in the United States. With vaccination, the number of polio cases fell to less than 100 per year in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s.

Before measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, in the decade before the first measles vaccine became available in 1963, an estimated 400 to 500 people each year died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 1,000 suffered swelling of the brain from measles.

Many illnesses rarely even mentioned today were rampant before vaccinations, such as smallpox, pertussis and diphtheria.

The success of vaccines has a downside, one explained well by New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic contributor Richard Coniff in a column for the latter this month.

“Vaccines save us from diseases, then cause us to forget the diseases from which they save us,” Coniff wrote. “Once the threat appears to be gone from our lives, we become lax. Or worse, we make up other things to worry about.”

The “other things” to which Coniff refers include conspiracy theories about vaccinations that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. He asks a good question for parents to consider: “Which is worse, a fictitious link between the MMR vaccine and autism — now dismissed as fraudulent even by the journal in which it was originally published — or exposing your child every day to the possibility of measles, with all its potentially deadly or debilitating consequences?”

Most states wisely require vaccinations for children in public schools. While exemptions related to religious, ethical or moral reasons are permitted, unvaccinated children can be barred from school during outbreaks of vaccinepreventable illnesses. Public health is a legitimate function of government, and requiring vaccines has been a clear net positive in that regard.

With a new school year about to begin, parents should welcome the opportunity to protect their children. Vaccinations against diseases whose names we barely recognize are one of the big benefits of the modern world. We should not deny our children this overwhelmingly positive benefit of science.

— The Reading Eagle,

MediaNews Group