Maybe it’s not as bad as we think.
It’s certainly true that pockets of vaccine refusal persist in this country, as they have for many years. If those pockets are now experiencing greater numbers of measles cases, it may be on account of dire trends in far-off places.
This global explanation only kicks the can a little farther down the road, however. Measles cases are spreading here because they’re spreading overseas—OK, fine. But why is measles spreading overseas?
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Are vaccination rates really on a downward trajectory? Once again, the actual data complicate this narrative. Global immunizations against measles, like those in the U.S., are at or near an all-time high. Since the start of this century, the proportion of people around the world who have received at least one dose of the measles vaccine has increased by almost one-fifth. Meanwhile, the use of a second dose of the vaccine (which makes it more effective) has more than quadrupled on the global scale. In 2000, just 15 percent of people were getting both shots. Now, that number is up to 67 percent and still rising.
The salutary effects of all this work could not be more apparent. The global number of people who contract measles and the global number of people who die from it have each gone down by about 80 percent since 2000. As recently as 1980, more than 4 million cases of measles were reported every year. Despite massive population growth since then—an uptick of several billion people, worldwide—the annual number of measles cases has dropped to about one-fiftieth of what it used to be, to a few hundred thousand cases per year.
Given all this recent progress, the global measles crisis that’s underway seems somewhat paradoxical.
Basically, the argument is that outbreaks like we’ve seen with measles tend to burn quickly through the susceptible population, then run out of steam, and that the biggest cause of not being vaccinated in the US is not anti-vax foolishness but lack of access to medical care. The author argues that the full picture of the data is often not represented or mis-represented in media stories, which has caused some level of overreaction among vaccine proponents. There’s a lot of detail, so read it all and see what you think.