Roy Benaroch, MD on Measles

We’re all in this together. People sometimes imagine that whether or not to vaccinate is a personal decision—that it only affects your own children. And other people assume that as long as they’re own children are vaccinated, they don’t need to worry about what their neighbors do.  These fallacies come from a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work. Immunizations protect individuals from catching diseases, that’s true. But that’s not really their main purpose. We can’t just rely on immunizations to protect individuals one by one, because of several limitations. Some people can’t be vaccinated—including young babies. The MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine isn’t given until 12 months of age. Other people cannot be vaccinated because they have health or immune problems, or are undergoing chemotherapy. These cannot-be-vaccinated people, ironically, are at the highest risk of complications from infectious diseases. And, like any other medical interventions, vaccines don’t work 100% of the time. With the MMR vaccine, after completing the series of two doses 99% percent of individuals are fully protected for life. That’s an amazingly effective vaccine. But in a huge country like ours, even if 300 million people are fully vaccinated, 3 million of us (that’s the 1% who don’t respond to the vaccine) will remain unprotected. The Disneyland theme parks in California have about 40,000 visitors a day—even if they all were fully vaccinated, 400 woul...
Source: PHRMA - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news