Vietnam has largely refused to acknowledge their measles epidemic for over 5 years, and even official vaccination recommendations are weak (1 dose).<p><a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/measles-04232014175218.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/measles-04232014175...</a>
To use the verbiage from the article: there's a mountain of scientific evidence linking measles and increased mortality in infants, the very elderly and the immunocompromised, such as people undergoing chemotherapy, people with an organ transplant or people with AIDS. Why not argue like this when the topic of vaccination comes up?<p>Same with rubella. Who cares if some stupid parents' kid comes down with rubella? The problem is that the pregnant woman nearby whose vaccination didn't take might get it and deliver a child with severe neurological impairments!
The success story of vaccination means that people don't know the symptoms of these crippling diseases anymore. Even the hospital had trouble identifying the disease. Parents worry about vaccination shots because they don't know what it means to lose relatives to those diseases. The good news in this case was that the interviewed parent acknowledged his ignorance. He didn't try to spin it as if the children benefitted from his mistake.<p>We live very sheltered lifes but we can't know it. Tracking all that is being done to protect us is now beyond individual understanding. We have to trust the experts. And some people end up trusting sham experts.
> "We worried 10-12 years ago because there was a lot of debate around the MMR vaccine," said Bilodeau. "Doctors were coming out with research connecting the MMR vaccine with autism. So we were a little concerned."<p>No, there were no doctors (neither singular nor plural) coming out with research connecting the MMR vaccine with autism. Just one very misinformed celebrity.
This story reminds me of this recent NPR interview with an anthropologist on vaccine hesitancy [0]. The upshot of the research is that "skepticism of vaccines [is] 'socially cultivated.'" Many of the people refusing vaccines are intelligent and well-educated, but they end up trusting bad information for a variety of reasons.<p>Hopefully this parent and others in his community are now receiving better information. It's not mentioned below, but when I heard this interview it was longer and made the point that vaccine hesitant parents need to be approached with respect; the more confrontational the approach, the more defensive people with anti-vaccine views will become.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/13/694449743/medical-anthropologist-explores-vaccine-hesitancy" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/13/6944497...</a>
Anti-vaxxers could be accurately considered to be retrospective Darwin Awards contestants.<p>Doing their best to remove those genes that they have already contributed to the human gene pool.
Presumably if there was an "outbreak" they weren't the only parents not to vaccinate their children. The article doesn't really elaborate on that.
The HN title for this is one of those headlines that makes no sense: the opposite would be more of a news story.<p>The full headline, at least for me, is "Father at centre of measles outbreak didn't vaccinate children due to autism fears".