Once kids start dying, we'll see how people really feel about immunization mandates
"Anti-vaxxers" used to occupy a "crunchy," hardcore lefty space filled with moms who wouldn’t let their kids eat birthday cake at parties because of the toxins. Today, this has changed. The anti-vaxx space has been firmly taken over by a political movement that believes in "health freedom" and that immunization mandates are un-American.
I can tell you this as someone who railed against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, mask mandates and the general craziness that overtook the left during the COVID pandemic: If you fail to get your child the usual childhood vaccines — measles, mumps and rubella, polio, whooping cough, etc. — you have fallen prey to an insidious lie. Failure to vaccinate against these diseases is dangerous to your child and to all other children they come into contact with. Frankly, that is as un-American as anything.
In America, we usually rally together to protect our own. But this anti-vaxxer movement is putting all of our children at risk. Children are already dying, and those numbers are only going to get exponentially worse. When it’s your child that either dies or causes another child to die, your eyes tend to open quickly to the scam of "anti-vaxxer movement" — a movement started by charlatan scammers that unfortunately (and understandably) has ensnared many devout and loving parents.
Thirteen states are already allowing immunization exemptions to school-age children for either religious or personal reasons, and that number is growing. Governors are issuing executive orders allowing extreme latitude for exemptions.
Before the measles vaccine was invented in 1963, millions of people died every year from this horrific illness. More than 500 children per year in the U.S. were its victims, and that doesn’t count the tens of thousands of hospitalizations with terrifying side effects, including life-threatening and life-altering welling of the brain. As Dr. Samuel Katz, a pioneer of the first measles vaccine, once said, “You don’t count your children until the measles as passed.” Do we really want to go back to waiting to tell people how many children we have until they’ve all survived the measles?
Last year, four states with lax policies shattered records for the explosion of previously eradicated diseases. Of those cases in children, 89 percent were unvaccinated. As for the vaccinated 11 percent, the vaccine is not 100 percent effective — nothing is — and what can happen is that if there is an unvaccinated child who gets the virus, they can easily pass it along to a vaccinated child who doesn’t have full immunity.
You have a 90 percent chance of getting measles if you are unvaccinated — that is huge. So how, in the past, were we able to eradicate measles? Herd immunity.
Prior to this anti-vaxxer movement, the few unvaccinated children (and the 5 percent or so still at risk despite vaccination) were protected by herd immunity. This basically means that if you aren’t vaxxed, but everyone around you is, you’ll be protected. But now that so many children and soon adults will be unvaccinated, everyone is at severe risk.
Measles was eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. But from 2010 to 2020 there was a 2,000 percent increase in annual cases of measles in the U.S. Since 2020, there has been a 17-fold increase in the number of measles cases, and that number is only just beginning to multiply. This is causing not only hospitalizations, life-long complications and deaths of children, but it is also costing states and the federal government enormous amounts of money.
So how did we go from an eradicated virus to crunchy moms not wanting to vaccinate their kids to an entire political movement behind it? Blame the greed and corruption of a few politicians and con-artist scientists.
Three main reasons have been given for not vaccinating children — that vaccines cause Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, that vaccines can cause fatal reactions and that vaccines cause autism.
That last one is by far the most frequent reason cited by anti-vaxxers, but it is completely false. The lie was created by a money-grubbing charlatan "scientist" who convinced parents that vaccines cause autism using faked data. He made up the data and performed highly unethical and dangerous testing to prove his point, then made millions of dollars from it. It was never science — it was a scam for his own financial gain. He made millions off of the death of children and unfathomable suffering of countless families.
All of the research he cited has since been debunked. Unfortunately, the anti-vaxxer movement took off before this could be discovered.
As for vaccines causing SIDS, this is simply an example of correlation not necessarily implying causation. Both of these things (vaccinations and SIDS) occur before a child turns one year old, and so the two are very likely to go together, even if they are unrelated. It’s like asserting that eating bread causes car crashes, since most drivers who crash their cars could probably be shown to have eaten bread within the previous 24 hours. Just because the two things are correlated (happen at the same time) doesn’t mean one causes the other.
Finally, there is the risk that you could die from a reaction to a vaccine. There is at least a small risk related to taking nearly anything. But if you get measles, you have a 1 in 500 chance of dying. If you get vaccinated for measles you have a 1 in a million chance of dying from a reaction. I know what risk I’d prefer my child to have.
If state legislators and governors want to relax the regulation behind childhood immunizations, they have that power. But we, as voters, citizens and parents have the right to do the truly American thing and get our children immunized against these dangerous diseases.
When we choose not to vaccinate, we aren’t just making that choice for our own children. We are putting at risk every child they come into contact with. And I’m going to guess that, as soon as a child who one of these legislators knows dies from measles, they will change their tune very quickly.
Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.
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