In that short period of time between getting the shot and becoming fully vaccinated, my son managed to give me measles. Got a high fever, weakness and permanent scarring on my shoulders.
While I didn’t like shots when I was in pre-school, I thought it was awesome that I got to avoid measles. And someday there would be a chicken pox vaccine so kids wouldn’t have to go through that.
Today’s NYT, gifted:
Vaccine Makers Curtail Research and Cut Jobs
In Massachusetts, Moderna is pulling back on vaccine studies. In Texas, a small company canceled plans to build a factory that would have created new jobs manufacturing a technology used in vaccines. In San Diego, another manufacturing company laid off workers.
Vaxcyte, a vaccine company near San Francisco, said last summer that it was pausing development of vaccines to protect against strep and the diarrhea-causing bacteria Shigella, attributing the decision to other priorities and a changing political and business climate.
This season, the number of flu vaccine doses distributed in the United States is on pace to fall to its lowest level in 12 years. That figure has dropped steadily since reaching a high point five years ago during the Covid pandemic. Researchers blame the rise of misinformation about vaccines.
Antivaxers LOVE to reference the Brady Bunch as “evidence” measles was not only viewed as insignificant way back when but actually as a source of laughs.
Wait, are you suggesting that hair tonic doesn’t give you an orange afro, and that a tiki idol doesn’t cause bad luck?
And the Brady Bunch proves (proves I tell you) that that whole story about a “Vietnam War” is a complete lie. If there was some sort of war going on, surely it would have come up in a story taking place at the same time period.
Heh. In the play Feiffer’s People, there’s a scene where two teen-aged American girls are talking. One of the girls has just read For Whom The Bell Tolls, and is going on about how dreamy Robert Jordan is. The other girl is skeptical of the premise of the plot, because “my mother and I did Spain last year, and we never heard anything about a civil war.”
It helps to know that the novel’s backdrop is the Spanish Civil War, and that Jules Feiffer wrote the source comic during the Franco era.
Back to anti-vaxxers.
Many are probably familiar with the satirical anti-vax cartoon done by caricaturist James Gillray in 1802. It showed a chaotic crowd of the recently vaccinated with cow parts growing from their bodies, etc. (Because cow pox pathogens were used to immunize against small pox.)
I’m sure I was exposed to it in high school, but at the time I thought it reflected the artist’s serious fears of the practice. It was only in recent years I learned that he was a humorist.
Apparently his illustrations were enjoyed by many for laughs, but according to at least one historian (and no, alas, I don’t have a cite) this illustration was reproduced and widely distributed by the variolators of the day. Variolation was an earlier and much more dangerous form of immunization to smalllpox. They had a financial incentive to spread unfounded fears about vaccination.
Looking on line for information about vaccination in general, I find that an awful lot of the disinformation about its safety is on websites for law firms. Even more is from those selling woo gadgets and “natural” substances they say will protect better than vaccines.
So once again (and more than 200 years later) vaccination is being condemned by those who stand to profit if people reject it.
Measles was a rare disease by that time, but chicken pox wasn’t. It was another 20 or so years before it no longer had to be a childhood rite of passage.
One of my college friends was born in 1953, the oldest of 6 kids, and they all had measles at the same time. That could not have been a fun experience for their mother, who by that time was on her own.
It seems to me that there were SDMB members who are partially deaf to this day due to childhood measles. I had (and the past tense is intentional) a cousin who grew up before the polio vaccine. She died at the age of 40, from the after-effects of that disease.
I had measles as a child (along with other, now vaccine-preventable diseases). I don’t remember the measles being that bad, but my mother told me I was quite sick. I think it was the better part of two weeks before I was (mostly) recovered.
A lesser-known aftereffect of measles is that it’s long been known to impair the immune system for as long as a year or two afterwards, and this was only fully understood within the past few years. People who have lived in areas that had measles have said that many of them almost resemble, health-wise, untreated AIDS patients.
My wife is deaf in one ear as a result of pre-vaccine childhood measles. Her aunt was wheelchair-bound most of her life due to pre-vaccine polio. We both get every available vaccine, and made sure our daughter did, too.
I was miserable with the measles. I had a high fever, and I was hallucinating like crazy. It was at least two weeks before I was better, as well. And I spread it to my three siblings. In those days, you had to go to the Health Dept to get a sign-off on being able to return to school after a course of measles.