It’s full-on spring here in Middle Tennessee, and the world is suddenly blooming with infants. There’s a new baby in my family and three more in my small neighborhood alone. All winter, the babies were tucked safely away at home, but now the sidewalks and the parks and the malls have filled up with strollers.
My first child was born during flu season, too, and I well remember the stern admonitions to keep him home till infections waned. But that was 1992. There was no reason for his pediatrician to warn me that I needed to keep him away from anyone who wasn’t vaccinated against other deadly infectious diseases. Before the internet deluded people into believing that an online search was commensurate with a medical degree, vaccination rates were high enough in this country to provide de facto herd immunity.
By the time my last child was born in 1998, the whole conversation had changed. That year, a long since discredited study published in The Lancet, a medical journal, claimed a link between autism and the M.M.R. vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. Suddenly parents were turning themselves inside out in an effort to calculate what constitutes a reasonable risk to take with a deeply loved child.
More and more of them concluded that it made no sense to take any risk, however small, when vaccine rates overall made the likelihood of encountering these diseases seem minuscule. As long as most others were accepting the risk of vaccines, their thinking went, there was no need for all parents to do so.
The study that initially raised so many concerns was debunked more than 20 years ago. Today there is absolutely no reason to believe that the measles vaccine causes autism. Nevertheless, vaccination rates continue to fall.
Now a measles outbreak is raging in unvaccinated communities in West Texas and New Mexico, and a longtime anti-vaccine activist oversees health policy in this country. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, can bring himself to offer only the barest acknowledgment that vaccines prevent measles. He urges useless and unscientific alternatives and insists that vaccination is a personal choice.
“Whether or not you want to catch and transmit this disease in an epidemic situation where a child has died — he’s saying that’s your choice,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The New Yorker.
Measles is exceptionally infectious, and cases have now popped up in many other states, including Kentucky and Georgia. That was near enough to home for me to start worrying. Then, on Friday, the first case was confirmed in Tennessee.
All vaccines carry the remote risk of triggering a dangerous reaction, but that risk is infinitesimal compared with the risk of being unprotected against infectious disease. Before the vaccine, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization. And though most people who contract measles survive, the risk of long-term complications can last for years, particularly when the infection occurs in children younger than 2.
It’s all those babies — in my family, in every family the world over — who keep me up at night. The first dose of measles vaccine is not routinely administered until an infant is at least 12 months old. (A second dose is given at 4 to 6 years.) What this schedule means is that every infant in this country is essentially unprotected in the event of a widespread outbreak.
The cemetery next to my grandparents’ church is filled with tiny graves and headstones that say things like, “Another jewel has been added to the Master’s crown.” It’s no mystery why my parents vaccinated me against every disease they could. I still have a small round scar on my upper arm from the smallpox vaccine — a shot that’s no longer given to children because vaccines, along with assiduous containment of outbreaks, eradicated smallpox.
There’s a question about the effectiveness of the measles vaccine that Americans of my generation received, however, and some vaccinated people need to be vaccinated again. Today the vaccine is made from a live, attenuated virus, and a single-dose version of it was available as early as 1963. If you got that vaccine, you’re protected from measles in most circumstances, although certain people — those who live in or are traveling to an area with an outbreak, for example — may need an additional shot.
But some children who were vaccinated between 1963 and 1968 received a vaccine made from a dead virus. Those people, Dr. Offit told Katie Couric, should consider themselves effectively unvaccinated. If you don’t know your vaccination status and don’t have a record of your childhood immunizations, a blood test can measure your level of antibodies and let you know if you need a vaccine.
Or you can simply schedule a shot at a nearby pharmacy and play it safe. That’s what I did. Since a second dose would boost my immunity anyway, regardless of which single-shot vaccine I received in the 1960s, I figured I might as well skip the blood test and go straight for the shot.
My own safety wasn’t my chief concern. Doing everything I can to protect my fellow human beings who cannot be vaccinated — babies too young for the vaccine, people with compromised immune systems, people who are allergic to the components of the vaccine — seems to me to be the only moral thing to do for anyone living in close community with other people. And that’s almost all of us.
Community is a concept that the MAGA movement is working overtime to undo, but human beings are a social species. We depend on one another for safety and survival. When we vaccinate our children, we are keeping them safe, but we are also keeping those who cannot be vaccinated safe. It’s part of the social contract.
To be in community is to recognize that we all, whoever we are, whatever we may believe, have an obligation to support and protect one another, to work together to create a society that is safe for everyone, including our most vulnerable neighbors. How is it possible that protecting babies is a “personal choice”? How is it possible that anyone could believe we don’t — every single one of us — have an obligation to protect them?
I think most of us understand that. My parents certainly understood it. And anyone who takes a walk through a country churchyard, stooping to read the tiniest headstones, will understand it, too.
The post Why I Got the Measles Vaccine at Age 63 appeared first on New York Times.
