While COVID-19 vaccines have saved lives, the measles vaccine has been an even bigger success story. Before the vaccine was developed in 1963, outbreaks that occurred every two to three years killed 2.6 million people a year worldwide, most of them children. Others developed pneumonia or suffered brain injuries and deafness due to measles-associated encephalitis.
It is an incredibly contagious airborne disease. Put a person with measles in a room with 100 other people and 90 of them will become infected. But the vaccine is even more effective than transmitting the disease. If all 100 people in that room were vaccinated, only four would become infected.
That's why it's especially disheartening to see the new measles cases in Florida: eight and rising at the latest count. It's not the biggest measles outbreak in recent years, but the dull attitude of the state's top public health official, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, is deeply troubling.
Most of the cases so far have been among students at a Broward County elementary school. But one is a preschooler (an extremely dangerous age for complications) whose connection to school is unclear. Something like that would surely happen. Measles is infectious from four days before the telltale rash appears until four days afterward. That means parents often don't know when their child might be infected and able to spread the virus to others in and out of school.
Florida has a reasonable law requiring vaccinations for children who attend public or private schools. Unlike California, which allows exemptions only for children with legitimate health reasons, Florida allows parents to opt out based on religious beliefs, a loophole common throughout the country. And vaccination rates at the primary school in question were higher than the national average of 97%.
However, the problem in quelling this outbreak is the lackadaisical attitude of Ladapo, who has gained notoriety by promoting skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine. Last month, he called for a halt to the use of mRNA vaccines to combat COVID-19. Still, it was shocking that in the midst of the outbreak he ignored the public health standard set by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which requires isolating unvaccinated people for 21 days after possible exposure and allows parents to decide whether or not they should get vaccinated. send their unvaccinated children to school. He didn't even encourage parents of unvaccinated children to get a quick preventive dose.
It is a reprehensible danger to students at the affected school and the community at large, including babies too young to have been vaccinated. Children with compromised immune systems are at particular risk because they cannot be vaccinated safely. That includes children who are receiving chemotherapy for cancer.
A vaccine effectiveness rate of 96% is excellent, but it still means that about 4% of children do not gain immunity from their vaccines. That's why public health officials rely on “herd immunity” — meaning enough members of a community have been vaccinated to keep measles at bay. The reason more unvaccinated children have not gotten sick in this country is because there are enough parents doing the right thing: vaccinating their children and thus protecting the other children around them. But that may not be the case for long. Vaccine skeptics like Ladapo have been undermining Americans' confidence in vaccines in recent years.
Outbreaks can occur even in a community with high vaccination rates, as is the case at this Florida school. But widespread vaccination (and proper isolation protocols) keeps them small. Measles is not a minor childhood inconvenience, and Ladapo's approach of downplaying science is not the way to protect the health of Florida's children.
