The ongoing failure by a small, vocal group of California parents to vaccinate their children against measles and other deadly diseases is blatantly irresponsible.
It’s bad enough that anti-vaxxers ignore sound science and put the lives of their children at risk. But it’s unacceptable that their actions also threaten the lives of those who are too young to be vaccinated or can’t receive the preventive treatment for medical reasons.
These parents claim that vaccinations put children at a higher risk of autism, a myth stemming from a 1998 Lancet article that the magazine later retracted. A British medical board took away the author’s medical license after finding Dr. Andrew Wakefield “had been dishonest, violated basic research ethics rules and showed a ‘callous disregard’ for the suffering of children involved in his research.”
Responsible scientists have been trying to repair the damage ever since. A comprehensive new study by researchers at Copenhagen’s Statens Serum Institut of 500,000 people concluded that there was no link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. The study, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was just the latest of a series of scientific investigations offering unequivocal evidence that vaccines are safe.
The issue remains a concern because a small group of anti-vaxxers continue their misguided efforts.
California’s vaccination rate for kindergarten children showed a decline in the state’s most recent assessment, falling from 95.6 percent in 2016 to 95.1 percent in 2018. The difference may seem small, but it’s significant. Santa Clara County Public Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody says a minimum 94 percent immunization rate is needed to guard against an outbreak.
Every Bay Area county, with the exception of one, also showed a vaccination rate decrease.
This, despite the Legislature in 2015 passing a mandatory child vaccination law introduced by Dr. Richard Pan, a state senator from Sacramento. Health officials believe the decline is largely due to parents skirting the law by seeking doctors who will grant bogus medical exemptions for their children. Pan is considering legislation to close this loophole. It can’t come too soon.
The vaccination rate matters. Bay Area health officials last week reported the first measles outbreak of the year with three confirmed cases, in Santa Clara, San Francisco and Santa Cruz counties.
The state of Washington is experiencing an even larger outbreak with 70 cases. It should come as no surprise that the great majority of those cases are in Clark County, which has an immunization rate of only 78 percent.
Nor should Californians forget the 2015 outbreak at Disneyland, where more than 150 people became infected with the highly contagious disease. The Centers for Disease Control continues to call vaccines “one of the greatest public health developments of the last century.” Prior to 1963, before the development of the measles vaccination, more than 500,000 cases of measles were reported in the United States every year, resulting in nearly 50,000 hospitalizations and 450-500 deaths.
It’s time to stop endangering lives by perpetuating misinformation about vaccines. Parents have a responsibility to protect their children and others from disease and even death.
— The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)