Katie Mack: Prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, it killed more than 400 Americans per year, with children being the most vulnerable. Due to childhood vaccination, deaths from measles were nearly entirely eliminated in the US in the 1990s. The rise in antivax rhetoric is killing children.

Prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, it killed more than 400 Americans per year, with children being the most vulnerable. Due to childhood vaccination, deaths from measles were nearly entirely eliminated in the US in the 1990s. The rise in antivax rhetoric is killing children.

It's heartbreaking in so many ways. "A young child has died of measles in Ontario, marking the first death in the province from the highly contagious virus in more than 10 years, a Public Health Ontario report confirms. The child, who was under the age of 5, was not immunized against the virus"

Child under 5 dies of measles in Ontario: PHOwww.cp24.com A young child has died of measles in Ontario, marking the first death in the province from the highly infectious virus in more than 10 years, a Public Health Ontario report confirms.

Fucking hell - from the article: "in Toronto, the percentage of seven-year-olds fully vaccinated for measles dropped from 80.2 per cent in the 2019-2020 school year to 38.9 per cent in the 2021-2022 school year."

It’s so bad

I'm in BC and it's so bad here. Family I don't speak with much but care deeply about, my nieces who are at constant risk - it's awful. There are so many fires to put out that had no right to be set...

I am very sorry the coverage is trending so negatively in North America. It could be worth reflecting on why. A starting point can be to investigate what the MMR coverage in Sweden is, in light of the country’s role as a chastised hellscape who got everything wrong by both “sides” in America.

Holy shit I didn’t realize it’d gotten that bad that quickly.

"vaccination rates for measles have also slipped in recent years" no no i think i would call that plummeting

They are going to f__k around and find out. 🤬

And what's awful about that is that we count those costs in lives of little kids and people with immunity issues. What kind of a world have we made where we stopped caring for each other to this degree?

My mom started the public health program here in the 1960s. She would take me w/ her on her rounds to visit kids ravaged by polio who caught it before the vaccine was available. She kept an active license until her death to help administer vaccines if needed. It would have killed her to see this.

This is her in the community hospital's new labor and delivery wing. A devout Catholic who was pro-choice and super-pro-vaccines.

Wow - you must be so proud of her! ❤️ I really think there's two things we all need as we shape our identities - people who know how to model for us how to offer service to our communities, and also show us how to keep going when that gets very hard. I think we're all struggling with the last bit.

my grandmother's entire career was teaching children disabled by these diseases...

It's heartbreaking because they worked so hard. My mom was so proud of the vaccine science. ♥️♥️

I don't know how we can fight weaponized populist antiintellectualism that fuels these anti-vaxxer beliefs, I have no idea how to fight it. Information and education doesn't seem to help and it just gets rejected. What do we do?

You fight it by calling out thier bullshit and tell them to get thier heads out of thier asses. If it causes rifts(like it has in my immediate family) so be it. I sleep well at night knowing im doing the right thing.

Shame and consequences. Call them out, do not let them feel comfortable in their anti-vaxxing beliefs and actions. Make them actually SEE their choices aren't acceptable. Let them get sick, go to the hospital, etc. They only understand and care about what affects them personally.

You have to fight anti-autism hate. that's where it really started

Dang herd immunity is well over 90%. 1-1/Ro

To be fair, that statistic is for FULLY VACCINATED 7-year olds as recorded in the middle of the pandemic, when people were on lockdown and routine medical procedures were postponed indefinitely. Not saying this isn't a problem, saying that the statistic is likely an outlier.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

FUCK

Yikes

We recently had to get our 4yo the second MMR shot due to different schedules b/w Cali and NS. The public health clinic literally would not book her an appt until we tried multiple private clinics, and the private clinics wouldn’t return calls.

When we did get an appt through the public clinic they were great; it was only a couple weeks out, and they filled in a couple other shots we hadn’t realized we’d missed or weren’t standard in Cali. But getting to that point required effort.

It's so surprising how much effort it takes. I also don't recall it being this tricky but my kids are all now cruising 20 or so so I've been out of the game a while. Our COVID shots were really well managed -basically got texts to set an appt and boom, done for free.

Covid and flu shots every fall have been much easier. But this was when the Quebec outbreak had just hit the headlines, and we don’t have a family doctor, so we couldn’t just do an office visit.

I was out a family doctor for 1 1/2 years - just got one but am I okay? Not too sure. Best wishes you find one soon.

Holy shit

Anti-vaccination is LITERALLY killing the country.

That Andrew Wakefield is allowed to get an ounce of sleep is maddening.

I said what I think about him, I’m pretty sure I’d get banned and the police would be at my door

Same.

And far more than that, due to the immune amnesia thing -- it's just that nobody realized those were due to getting measles first.

Globally, the burden of disease was enormous: 750,000 deaths/year as recently as 2000. Global vaccination programs and improved post-exposure care have greatly reduced that, although there's still work to do. From: www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview...

I nearly died of measles as a toddler (1972) and my mom still remembers how scared she was. I can't believe parents put their kids through this, but it feels like there are parents today who are too damaged by everything from anti-vax to the gun lobby to function as carers.

Very good point.

I was born that year but managed to get M M, & R before being vaccinated. I remember the misery of all of them, the physical pain of mumps is a visceral memory.

I got the mumps when I was 16 years old. Caught it from my little brother. I was so sick that I fainted when I tried to get out of bed.

I'll just assume you're not an antivaxxer.

No, I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am just old. There was no mumps vaccine when I was 16. In fact, I worked as a virologist in my first career and co-authored many articles including this one: MEASLES SUSCEPTIBILITY AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN1 | American Journal of Epidemiology | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

Human Verificationoup.com

I'm really grateful to have a family full of smart people, including an epidemiologist. We have one family member who can't seem to develop rubella immunity through vaccination. When she was pregnant, we were grateful for herd immunity and knew family members were safe.

I had measles at 2 years old. I am grateful I don't remember it because from my parents' description it didn't sound good. My dad once told me "you don't know what fear is until you see your toddler so delirious from fever they talk nonsense just to keep themselves from passing out."

I was vaccinated, it was one of those rare breakthrough cases

i’m a doctor from a third world hellhole, and one of my worst on-call memories is spending the entire night with my colleagues manually ventilating a 4 yr old kid who got pneumonia because of measles. when people in the developed world shun vaccines, i wish i could show them what that entails.

I don't know what's more remark: how incredibly successful many of these massive public drives for immunization have been, or the fact that diseases are so slippery that we've only ever eliminated a single disease from the face of the planet. We're soooo close on a few others.

Two, actually. Rinderpest is extinct in the wild.

Rinderpest was declared eradicated in 2011, 10 years after the last documented outbreak in 2001. It's just a press release, but one where being wrong is especially embarrassing, so the decision is largely a decision for administrators working on the guidance of experts.

Never heard of that, and it looks like maybe an animal specific disease? I was more just referring to human diseases. For a time, I thought we had also eliminated polio, but I guess it still has enclaves in Africa.

Rinderpest is a disease of cows, at least as old as Ancient Rome. Type 2 and 3 poliovirus serotypes have been eliminated from the wild, but two countries remain endemic for Type 1: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Two out of three wild poliovirus strains eradicatedwww.who.int In an historic announcement on World Polio Day, an independent commission of experts concluded that wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3) has been eradicated worldwide. Following the eradication of smallpox a...

Soooooo close. Let's get it to only 2 (human) diseases eliminated! (Man we suck as a species at global scale - it's really just politics, not resources).

Rinderpest was indirectly responsible for millions of human deaths due to the severe famines it caused: ourworldindata.org/how-rinderpe...

How rinderpest was eradicatedourworldindata.org Rinderpest was a disease that primarily infected cattle and buffalo. Thanks to a decades-long international campaign, it was the first animal disease to be eradicated.

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