THE HARMFUL MESSAGE OF THE ANTI-VAXXERS.
CRISES EMERGE FROM CONTACT WITH UNVACCINATED
Vancouver is trying to contain a measles outbreak that has racked up 13 confirmed cases thus far, and may have spread into Alberta. As with all the other measles outbreaks in the developed world of late, it has been driven exclusively by falling vaccination rates among the general populace. Here is a quick guide to why Canada’s unvaccinated aren’t endangering just themselves. UNVACCINATED PEOPLE ARE CAUSING THESE OUTBREAKS
By refusing to immunize, unvaccinated persons turn themselves into vessels for a preventable infectious disease.
Western Canada currently is in the grip of a measles outbreak imported to Canada by international travellers. One of them was an unvaccinated 11-year-old boy who picked up the disease on a vacation to Vietnam. Had he had been vaccinated against measles, he almost certainly would have returned without incident. But as it is, he became the carrier of what blossomed into a regional public health crisis.
SOME PEOPLE CAN’T BE IMMUNIZED
There is a demographic of innocent people who, despite taking every precaution, can be sickened or killed if they happen to share a day care, public bus or hospital ward with an unvaccinated person. Infants can’t be vaccinated for the first few months of life. Vaccines also don’t work for people with compromised immune systems, be they chemotherapy patients or those with autoimmune diseases. Occasionally, a vaccine also will fail to prompt an immune response, meaning that a person who has received the vaccine nevertheless is still susceptible to infection.
In a society where more than 90 per cent of people are immunized, all of these categories of people are protected because there aren’t enough carriers of the disease for it to gain a foothold, a phenomenon known as “herd immunity.” When vaccination rates drop, however, infants and the immunosuppressed suddenly find themselves surrounded by people who are potential carriers of preventable infectious diseases.
THE UNVACCINATED ARE KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE
Europe currently holds the dubious distinction of being the world’s centre for vaccine skepticism. In a 2016 survey, up to 41 per cent of the population of France did not believe that vaccines are safe. As a direct result of this increasing abandonment of immunization, Europe recently has been seized by outbreaks of preventable diseases. In just the first six months of 2018, 41,000 Europeans came down with the measles, and 37 died.
A particularly insidious belief among anti-vaxxers and the “vaccine-hesitant” is that diseases like measles aren’t that bad. This has even prompted the growth of “measles parties,” where parents willingly expose their unvaccinated children to the disease to “get it over with.” But measles isn’t the chicken pox: One in five cases require hospitalization and it kills roughly one in every 350 to 1,200 cases.
WITHOUT IMMUNIZATION, PREVENTABLE DISEASES COULD RETURN TO 1930s LEVELS
Without public vigilance towards immunization, there’s no reason preventable diseases couldn’t return with just as much deadliness as in the pre-vaccination age. It was not too long ago that a vaccine-preventable disease, diphtheria, was Canada’s leading cause of childhood death. Before the measles vaccine, the United States used to see it kill 500 people per year and hospitalize 48,000 others. Even polio, which currently exists only in small corners of Africa and Central Asia, conceivably could explode once again into Canadian schools and hospital wards.
THE DAMAGE FROM A SINGLE UNVACCINATED CHILD CAN BE OVERWHELMING
In 2015, a single, measles-infected person spent the day at Disneyland. That single measles carrier ended up causing an outbreak that sickened 147 people in cases ranging from Canada to Mexico to seven U.S. states.
In Canada, calls are rising for mandatory vaccination of children, with 70 per cent saying it should be a requirement to enter the public school system. Legal professionals in both Canada and the United States are weighing the legality of suing the unvaccinated for damages.
If these actions all seem a bit heavy-handed, it’s because of the immense damage that unvaccinated people can do to civil society. Even if nobody is permanently injured or killed, a potential outbreak spawns a minor health crisis.
After an employee at a Richmond Toys “R” Us became a confirmed measles case, Vancouver Coastal Health quickly had to warn customers and employees of the toy store that they or their children could be next. Earlier this year, B.C. Children’s Hospital had to put out a public alert warning parents that their already-sick children may have been exposed to measles because they shared a waiting room with a known measles patient.
VACCINE RISK IS OVERWHELMINGLY OUTWEIGHED BY THE BENEFITS
Although immunization has singularly sent whole global plagues into retreat, sometimes a shot goes wrong. Almost exclusively, This is in the form of rashes, fever or allergic reaction, although in rare (roughly one in a million) cases, a vaccine can spark a lifelong disability. Canadian public health professionals keep close tabs on every incident of vaccine injury, and in the United States there is even a nofault compensation program for those injured by vaccines (no such national program exists in Canada, although there have been calls to implement one).
The measles vaccine also is particularly safe. Of 102 million doses of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine administered to Americans between 2006 and 2017, only 120 resulted in payouts from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. According to one estimate, it is approximately 6,000 times more dangerous to get measles than to receive the measles vaccine.