The long war
As early as our nation’s founding, vaccines were seen as a way to protect public health.
With July Fourth drawing close, it’s worth remembering that the freedoms Americans enjoy rest lightly on a vaccine mandate. Gen. George Washington ordered his soldiers to be inoculated against small pox in 1777. More men were falling victim to the disease than the Redcoats’ muskets, and Washington believed that inoculation was key to the army’s survival.
Very different circumstances, of course, but Washington’s vaccine mandate stands in sharp contrast to the current law in Texas. Over a decade ago, lawmakers allowed parents to claim conscientious objections to routine vaccinations and exempt their children from them upon enrollment in public school.
As a result, the number of schoolchildren who have not been vaccinated has grown from 2,300 kids to roughly 45,000 in the past 13 years. While the immunization rate in our state is still strong, in some communities in Texas, vaccine coverage has slipped below the 90- to 95-percent level that is needed to prevent an outbreak, according to Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital.
Anti-vaccination proponents scored more minor victories in this legislative session, with the Legislature voting to bar doctors from fully vaccinating foster children during their initial examination. This movement against medically approved vaccinations is a growing danger to public health. Legislators must rely on science — not rumor or anecdote — when crafting future legislation.
If healthy children aren’t receiving vaccines, they are putting children who are too young to receive the vaccine and people with compromised immune systems at elevated risk of infection. “The anti-vaxxer groups, while claiming to support ‘vaccine choice’ as a civil liberty, are in fact stripping away the civil liberties of parents who now have to worry about their infants contracting measles or other deadly diseases,” Hotez says.
To avoid outbreaks of measles and other preventable diseases, parents should follow the vaccination protocol recommended by their physician. They should speak up at PTA meetings and explain to skeptics how immunization protects families and communities. Pediatricians need to be more vocal about the importance of vaccines for children healthy enough to receive them.
Washington wasn’t the only Founding Father to believe in vaccinations. Benjamin Franklin established an organization to help deliver inoculations to the poor, free of charge. James Madison signed the first vaccine legislation in U.S. history in 1813. Thomas Jefferson said as to the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, “I know of no one discovery in medicine equally valuable.”
Vaccines drew their share of controversy even in the early days of the Republic. Opponents wrote pamphlets and published satirical cartoons against state-promoted vaccines and perceived government encroachment. But these protestors were — and still are — on the wrong side of history.
In his autobiography, Franklin gave vaccine-hesitant parents some good advice still relevant today: “In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation.”