Quote from a mom on the fence in the article<p>“On one side, they make you afraid, and the other side they make you feel stupid, and you get stuck in this middle where you feel beat up by both sides,” she said.<p>Not trying to be condescending but this frustrates me even more than anti vaxers who have an identity in supporting their idiotic parade.<p>This woman is sincerely trying to figure out what is best for her child and she couldn’t do it until she had a 2 hour one on one conversation with her doctor. She has no agenda. And she can’t figure it out with honest effort even with the internet. Our society lacks clear trusted authorities on important basic issues. And our citizens lack critical reasoning skills. Why is she so bad at this? serious question. How is our general population so poorly equipped?<p>I’m glad she did go have that 2 hour conversation, but that feels like the kind of solution we can’t reasonably provide to all people. It shouldn’t require that.
It's a simple fact that vaccines are safe and perhaps the best medical tool we have along with antibiotics to prevent mass death. Only 0.0001% of vaccination doses result in significant complications (roughly 3,800 compensated injuries out of 3.4B doses over ~30y, something like 5,600 total filed injuries [1]). It's also true that they work in part through herd immunity, the concept that if most people are vaccinated, diseases can't spread to those who aren't or can't be.<p>Still, enough people find this controversial, resorting to conspiracy-minded thinking. It's another example of how science doesn't seem to sink through, and repeating facts doesn't seem to help. Maybe figuring out how to communicate more empathetically through people's perceived values can help [2]. But honestly I'm at a loss, and it's deeply tragic to see so much needless suffering.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/data/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/data/index.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/antivax-measles-outbreak-moral-foundations-theory.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/antivax-measles-outbrea...</a>
got me to learn about the oldest known record of measles symptoms <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Zakariya_al-Razi" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Zakariya_al-Razi</a>
Measles is especially pernicious, too.<p>Not only is having measles deeply unpleasant at best and fatal at worst, surviving it leaves you more susceptible to other knock-on diseases for something like two or three years. Widespread measles vaccinations cratered the measles death rate, obviously, but it <i>also</i> cratered the deaths from pneumonia and the like.<p>Per [0][1][2], the epidemiological data is suggestive of this -- but sequencing the virus and poking around at its RNA is starting to figure out exactly how sneaky of a thing the virus is.<p>[0]<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/404963436/scientists-crack-a-50-year-old-mystery-about-the-measles-vaccine#.WO0uRq8Zu-0.facebook" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/4049634...</a><p>[1]<a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6235/694.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6235/694.abstract</a><p>[2]<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997572/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997572/</a>
I was in the Seattle Childrens ER this morning (unrelated issue with my son, hes fine) and chatted with a pediatrician about the outbreak. He said the ER has been inundated with parents bringing (unvaccinated) kids with related symptoms to rule out measles, and STILL refusing to vaccinate at that point. At a certain point public health needs to take priority. Vaccines need to be treated like any other basic norm around health/hygiene that we have societal and legal expectations around.
This has been all over the local Portland news for weeks.<p>Here are a few more details (but from memory so I could be slightly off):<p>About 50 kids in Clark County have come down with measles so far.<p>49 of kids with measles were unvaccinated.<p>1 kid with measles received one dose of the vaccine. SOP is for two doses.<p>No kid that received both doses has contracted measles.<p>I haven't seen any reports of adults contracting measles.<p>One vaccine dose is about 93% effective, 2 doses are about 97% effective.<p>In Washington State (not sure if state as a whole or just Clark County) about 22% of kids aren't vaccinated.<p>In Oregon about 11% of kids aren't vaccinated.<p>---<p>When I was a kid smallpox vaccine was very common and polio vaccine was coming into use. People took vaccination very seriously. Read some history of those two diseases and you will quickly understand why.<p>In various settings (e.g. family doctor, various school nurses, etc) I probably received 2 doses of injected polio vaccine and 5 doses of oral vaccine. At least that I can remember. The number was probably higher. That's how serious the effort was to prevent polio. One high school teacher (polio victim) needed some metal contraption around his leg to help him walk. I.e. there were visible reminders of how serious polio was.<p>Smallpox vaccine was easier to keep track of. It left a slight scar on many peoples upper arm. So if you had the scar, it meant you had the vaccine!
When my daughter was born four years ago, the anti-vaccine movement in SF and the north bay was in full swing. Despite living only 40 miles south, she didn’t go to SF for the first time until after she was one.<p>She went to Budapest at 7 months old. I felt more comfortable taking her to Eastern Europe than San Francisco.
As I was reading, I started thinking, “What if all insurance plans budgeted 45 minutes for a Primary Care Provider visit instead of 15?”<p>(To be clear, I don’t know if ‘15 minutes’ is hard-codes anywhere, I just know that most appointments I’ve gone to are budgeted that much time.)<p>I say this, because of the multiple mentions of doctors spending multiple hours talking with patients.<p>If there was more time budgeted for PCP visits, then there would be time to have these conversations, and maybe address issues (real or perceived) before bad things happen.
We currently have a 3-year old who's vaccinated and a 5-month old who isn't because she can't be yet.<p>We also live near the epicenter of this outbreak, and it's enormously irritating how grossly irresponsible both lawmakers and people in the community have been around this issue.<p>Some of the kids at our eldest's preschool weren't vaccinated, which by proxy put all the families who also have much younger children at much, much higher risk. Thankfully a responsible amount if peer pressure was able to cajole those families to get their kids vaccinated finally.<p>But, the waves of anti-science BS that we're all wading through are growing in frequency and amplitude, and it's not clear how to ebb it.
> “It shouldn’t be called an outbreak,” Seattle-area mother Bernadette Pajer, a co-founder of the state’s main anti-vaccine group, Informed Choice Washington, said of the measles cases, arguing that the illness has spread only within a small, self-contained group. “I would refer to it as an in-break, within a community.”<p>This person has a serious lack of understanding about how outbreaks and epidemics work. All it takes is one plane ride, one cough at a public place, and you can infect dozens of people. Even if you infect just two people, this can grow <i>exponentially</i> over a few days, especially given that you are highly contagious four days before symptoms and four days after.<p>> I would refer to it as an in-break, within a community.<p>In-break with an <i>unvaccinated</i> community.
I was living in Orange County (CA) when my son was born. It would have been _very_ easy to find a midwife and a pediatrician that were totally fine and all-in on "alternative vaccination schedules." I can't speak for all other metros where this has played out, but I suspect the same is true in many places. Lack of knowledge (or holding on to provably false beliefs) isn't something that physicians are immune to.
I don't know much about this outbreak but in some parts of the world you are required to have your vaccinations up to date if you want access to public services.<p>Can't that be implemented at a state/local level?
> In fact, health officials say the virus is so contagious that if an unvaccinated person walks through a room two hours after someone with measles has left, there’s a 90 percent chance that an unvaccinated person will get the disease. People can spread measles for four days before the rash appears and for four days after.<p>Yikes!
Fuck, if only a bunch of clueless helicopter parents hadn't decided that Jenny McCarthy was an authority on vaccine safety, and had listened to the advice of every immunologist and epidemiologist on the planet.<p>You want to see the result of not vaccinating your children, en masse? Go visit a poor part of Pakistan, where you'll see people still afflicted by polio.
Is there anyone here on HN who reads a story like this and wonders to themselves, even if for a brief moment,<p>"Hm, the software system I get paid to develop just <i>might</i> be making a situation like this worse..."<p>Genuinely curious.
Having grown up in the Seattle area (now in SF since after college) I can’t say I’m surprised the Pacific NW is where anti-vaccination parents would cluster to create an epidemic. There’s the right mix of pseudo-intellects, granola hippies, and helicopter parenting to make it all so unsurprising
Maybe it's because it's taboo to say so, but I haven't even seen it speculated that the rise of these diseases be partly, or even mainly attributed to illegal immigration.<p>How many anti-vaxxers are there compared to those illegally crossing the border? There's a battery of vaccine requirements for any immigrant[1], but if tens of millions of those living in America skipped that part, it seems like a huge potential source of the problem.<p>1. <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/news/questions-and-answers/vaccination-requirements" rel="nofollow">https://www.uscis.gov/news/questions-and-answers/vaccination...</a>