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Scott Shelton
Staff Writer
A little over two years ago, the World Health Organization declared measles to have been eliminated in North and South America.
But now the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 10 states have reported cases of measles since Jan. 1.
According to the report, more than 80 percent of the 108 cases in Rockland County, New York, involved unvaccinated patients.
This occurrence of measles should serve as a warning to all Americans, particularly those advocating against vaccination, that the decision to vaccinate children should not be controversial.
In the past few years, there has been a lot of misinformation spread about vaccines.
Some say they are linked to autism in children.
Even President Trump said on Twitter in 2014 that there were many cases in which a child gets “pumped with massive shot of many vaccines,” and he linked vaccines to autism.
In the past two decades, the CDC has conducted multiple studies on vaccines and their ingredients, and each study showed no evidence linking to autism.
People also fear that children shouldn’t be given multiple vaccines at such a high rate.
Publichealth.org debunks this, reporting that the immune system of infants is stronger than what many believe it to be.
According to the organization, a baby theoretically can respond to 10,000 vaccines at one time.
The average number of scheduled vaccines for a child is around 14, but Publichealth.org says that today’s vaccines are far more efficient than they used to be.
Many states allow people to have religious exemptions to avoid vaccination due to their religious beliefs.
I understand that some religious groups and cultures are against vaccinations for various reasons.
But, at some point, lawmakers in states should stop allowing exemptions because unvaccinated people can harm anyone around them.
Even people who are vaccinated are not fully protected from contracting diseases.
But the CDC reports, the two doses of the measles vaccine are between 93 and 97 percent effective.
The same report states that an estimated three to four million people got measles in the United States each year before 1963.
But, since the inception of the measles vaccine, cases of the disease have gone down by 99 percent.
Irresponsibility among parents is resurfacing as a public health crisis that had already been eradicated, and with the simple use of vaccine can still be easily prevented.
