Amazing, we had measles wiped out in the United States but this year it seems to be surging. The worse it has been in decades. What has changed? Why would a disease that was wiped out be coming back now? 
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Why did parents stop vaccinating their children? Conflicting info on COVID from govt undermined confidence in recommendations. Miss information on social media? Fear of autism? Concerns that safety testing may be faulty? Religious or other objections to medical treatments?
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Yes to all of those but having a government that is anti vaccination does not help either. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea putting Kennedy in that spot?
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Yes, that one, mostly in widespread silent unacknowledged sentiment of “I hate shots, and my kids hate them and who needs them anyway cuz nobody get sick of that old fashioned stuff anyway”
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Same with polio…we almost had it eliminated (like smallpox), and now it’s making a comeback (especially in Islamic-controlled areas, where the imams are saying it’s a plot to sterilize Muslims).
To bring this back to investing, who makes those vaccines? Maybe get in early before the wave of illness motivates people to reconsider getting their kids vaccinated. Measles is highly contagious. If enough kids don’t have their shots, it could be an epidemic really fast.
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Misinformation, disinformation, and a decline in critical thinking skills.
Merck and GSK make the MMR vaccines that are approved by the FDA for use in the US.
Given our current direction, it might make more sense to invest in budesonide, clarithromycin, and cod liver oil producers…
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This has been brewing for decades. Thank Andrew Wakefield for a resurgence of the anti vaccine movement. I was predicting the return of this situation on the old H&N board as long ago as around 2006. Oddly enough, there was quite a strong anti science/anti vax sentiment there back then and the suggestion was roundly dismissed. Lasted well up until the emergence of Covid…and, of course, didn’t totally disappear. The board did.
As to your question, “How could it happen?”. Well, even if every living soul in a community were to get vaccinated, there will always be a small percentage who don’t mount an adequate immune response. Additionally you have to factor in those who cannot be vaccinated for one reason or another. That would still provide adequate herd immunity for protection unless or until someone travels outside the community boundaries or comes from an area where the level of disease is high and bring it in.
Measles is so contagious that you don’t need a drop of much below 95% full immunization to get a resurgence. I always reckon it’s a bit like doing crafts with a Brownie troop. If one kid is using glitter the other 20 will also get covered in the stuff…and everyone who comes into the room for the next week.
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People are willing to suspend the disbelief in how stupid they are.
Kind of like the Willing suspension of disbelief in order to watch a movie.
We suspend disbelief endlessly in our society. When people can they suspend disbelief for religious quagmires.
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Sure. But the outbreak would be very limited (as you know).
My mom’s generation lived with all sorts of horrors. She knew people growing up who were afflicted with polio. In my life, I’ve known ONE (in junior high). It’s because of the vaccines. But people don’t think about it. They think “why should I bother, it’s not an issue”. People are poor at evaluating risk/reward (that’s not a slam, it’s a scientific fact about our psychology).
Add religion, and misinformation, and you have a recipe for a lot of sick and dead people.
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Yes. I call such lazy sods immunological freeloaders and they’re a scourge on Society. The MMR vaccine isn’t the first valuable set of vaccines to be targeted by anti vaxxers. Back in the 1970s in England it was the P (pertussis) in the DTP shot in the dock. Again, thanks to a rogue medic…this one a pediatric neurologist, John Wilson, at Great Ormond Street Hospital (for Sick Children). Someone with a bit more gravitas than Fakefield…but just as wrong. Published a similar case series in a low rent journal…some sort of “neurological” damage allegedly related to the pertussis vaccines … and, before the wrong science had a chance to be shown as that, the TV and popular press grabbed ahold and ran with it. Whooping Cough reached almost epidemic proportions by the late 70s and early 80s when my daughter was born. Even if I’d been a vaccine skeptic (as they like to be known), given that everyone I knew who’d not vaccinated their child had a kid with Whooping Cough the risks from the disease itself were much greater than any associated with the vaccine!
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PSA:
My local lab blood test store front, sent me a July Special advertising MMR panel for $120 or measles titer for $50.
First time I’ve seen those offered.
ralph
When I knew that my daughter was planning to start a family, I decided on an MMR booster. Well, I can’t really call it a booster since I didn’t get it in the first place. I got Measles as a child, German Measles twice but no mumps. After we came here to live and my daughter was pregnant, I got the TDaP shot. We live close enough to Boulder…along with Ann Arbor, Michigan, one of the World’s epicenters of WOO! and nitwittery and just happened to be running a Whooping Cough outbreak at the time.
Interestingly, the daft beggars are the same about vaccines for their companion animals (they don’t call them pets in Boulder!!)…including rabies!
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Yeah, you’ve gotta love CO! Anti-vaxxers here are just as likely to be tree-hugging, patchouli stankin’ hippies as they are to be coal-rolling, open carry, J6 fanatics.
It’s nice that anti-vaxxers have found something that brings together both extremes.
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I got an mmr booster.
Born in 1963
You are assuming that reduced vaccination in just a few months can show up is large scale higher measle that fast? Is this even possible?
I asked ChatGPT and it said it takes 1-3 years to observe higher cases in the general public. I don’t know if this is correct or not but it seems reasonable.
And I do not think RFK should be in in any health related position
Mike
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It’s actually a very inclusive collective… I usually include liberal arts grads too. They oftentimes have an unwarranted confidence in their critical thinking skills or like the notion of “outside the box” thinking…little realising you need something of a grasp of what’s in the box in the first place or run the very real risk of landing in what seems to be a wonderful box that happens to be as wrong as wrong can be.
No “settled science” for these credulous rubes. BTW, that settled science malarkey is something that routinely crops up in discussions with anti science/anti vaxxers…a dead giveaway, in fact.
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No but I think he is helping to lead the charge on anti vacination. He has been in the hemisphere for years spouting his antivacination philosophy and now he has been given even a bigger pulpit. How many more acolytes can he bring to the altar for years to come because he has been given a modicum of respectability. His name was enough.
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Time to inject a dose o’ Dara into the discussion
This is one of my preferred ways to handle the twaddle and tomfoolery from the anti -science brigade. A good old belly laugh. Problem is, if I watch it through, that’s my evening gone as I can’t stop at one dose with this guy!
"Science knows it doesn’t know everything…
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Of course not…I don’t think buynholdisdead actually implied that…but the anti-vaxx movement, outbreaks of Measles, Whooping Cough, and I’ll wager it won’t be too long before German Measles is up there…pre-date recent events. And this is just the generally, and incorrectly, considered “harmless” childhood diseases. The potential for this, as I mentioned upstream, has been building since the early aughts. I first got a heads-up around 2004…and even that was a bit late to the party as the height of the media love-fest with Andrew Wakefield was starting to cool a little from the initial frenzy. RFK has been a hanger-on rather than a spearhead for any of this.
It’s a shame the old boards are history…it’d be quite an education to go back and look at the timeline of discovery and denialism WRT the unveiling of how this demonization of the MMR vaccine and how, by association flu, Covid, HPV, and even polio have been caught in the crossfire.
This is the guy who initially clued me in all those years ago (not the fist but one of the many from The Grauniad that I posted on the H&N board back in the day)
The MMR sceptic who just doesn’t understand science | Ben Goldacre | The Guardian The MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science | Ben Goldacre | The Guardian
Here’s one a few years later that accompanied the kerfuffle after Wakefield lost his license. Note the date…and ponder the reality that this zombie-science has not stayed dead.
Expert view: The media are equally guilty over the MMR vaccine scare | Ben Goldacre | The Guardian Expert view: The media are equally guilty over the MMR vaccine scare | Ben Goldacre | The Guardian
And a full coverage with facts that’d escaped my attention can be found in Brian Deer’s generally excellent book on the topic…The Doctor Who Fooled The World.
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The link has case rate and death rate.
The case rate sinks like a stone when the vaccine was invented in 1963.
What is interesting is that the death rate drops dramatically in 1940 to ~1 death per 200,000 persons and remains fairly flat for a decade then drops to 1 death in 300,000 persons to 1 death per 400,000 persons just prior to the vaccine.
Explanations? Improved sanitation? The virus mutated to a less deadly strain?
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