There are some people for whom vaccination is contraindicated for health reasons. Even among those who can be safely vaccinated, vaccines are not 100% effective; for example, the chicken pox vaccine is only about 70-90% effective. Individuals for whom a vaccine is ineffective/contraindicated rely on herd immunity to keep them safe. The compromising of herd immunity by people who choose not to be vaccinated puts others at risk.
I’ll point out that the chicken pox vaccine did not become available in the US until 1995; every year prior to that, it took millions of kids out of school while they were sick (often requiring a parent to take leave from work), put tens of thousands of people in the hospital with severe symptoms, and put 100-150 people in the ground. With the exception of that last group, life somehow continued, sure, but only with major complications: loss of classroom time, loss of time at work, and the accrual of major healthcare costs. Widespread vaccination, now that it’s available, could eliminate most of this suffering, costs, and loss of productivity.
It’s not so much the 30 cases of chicken pox that are infuriating, it’s the fact that the outbreak has highlighted a group of people who have foolishly eschewed vaccination - despite all of the information indicating that vaccination is a good thing.
Did you read the link about the importance of herd immunity? What “risks” did you consider inoculations might cause as opposed to the very real risks from not inoculating?
How do you feel about those that not only don’t get their kids or themselves inoculated, but feel there is no need to let you know when you are in their vicinity?
To clarify:
even though the chickenpox vaccine might be only 70-90% effective at preventing infection assuming you’re exposed, the herd immunity conferred by widespread vaccination reduces the frequency of exposure. The results, since the introduction of the vaccine in the US, are really good. Quoting from the CDC:
Side effects from vaccination are extremely rare. Assuming the vaccine is not contraindicated, the only reason for a person to decline vaccination is because they are prone to irrational thought.
In the early '90s there were about 4 million cases of varicella (chickenpox) annually in the U.S., 10,500-13,000 hospitalizations and 100-150 deaths. We’re doing a lot better now that the vaccine is available. From the CDC:
*"Chickenpox can be severe, especially for babies, adolescents, adults, pregnant women, and people with a weakened immune system. It can cause—
Bacterial infections of the skin and soft tissues in children, including Group A streptococcal infections
Pneumonia
Infection or inflammation of the brain (encephalitis, cerebellar ataxia)
Bleeding problems (hemorrhagic complications)
Bloodstream infections (sepsis)
Dehydration
Death"*
Note: it is popular among antivaxers to cite death as the only outcome of infectious disease worth mentioning (because the figures are lower than disease incidence with its attendant misery and complications, so in the bizarre calculus of the antivax crowd, the numbers are “manageable”).
Even if one is pro-vaccine, it’s good to be wary of recycling bad antivax arguments.
it’s pretty well accepted that vaccines are one the of the best inventions ever. Very sad that nutty people don’t get vaccines based on bad information.
What you do with your own children is your own business. But I hope you don’t make “weighted decisions” to drive drunk because it usually doesn’t kill anybody. That’s the correct moral analogy to make.
What if you had an infant too young to be vaccinated, would you appreciate someone else taking a “weighted decision” to be a chicken pox carrier? Before you start burbling about “so very rare”, consider it’s rare specifically because vaccination is a norm.
I was at the grocery store a few minutes ago. The headline on the local paper is about some lawyer who filed a legal challenge against the quarantine of these kids.
There were a few rich-hippie kids wandering around the school with their parents. I couldn’t help but wonder: are these kids infected with chickenpox?
And after they have CP, the virus remains in their body for life, giving them additional benefits, like the chance of the crippling pain or blindness that comes from shingles.
Several of my friends had chicken pox in high school, in the 1980’s, prior to the vaccine. My dad had it when I was little, when my brother brought it home from nursery school. All of them (except my brother and me, who also caught it from him) were very sick for weeks.
OK, so a lot of those 30 kids were from antivax families. One can at least make an argument that them getting sick is just, if you hold children accountable for their parents’ bad decisions. But were all of them? Maybe some of those kids came from families who really were doing what was best for their kids, but for whom there was good medical reason to skip the vaccine, or who got vaccinated but got sick anyway. Those are kids who are now sick because of other parents’ decisions. And that is just wrong no matter how you look at it.
My mother had shingles towards the end of her life, and it kept her from doing a lot of things she want to do. And was indeed horribly painful.
Anyone letting their kids in for even the possibility of this is sick.
Vaccines help prevent disease in two ways - first, by getting the vaccine, you greatly diminish the chance that you’ll get the disease; second, by getting the vaccine, you reduce the number of potential infected people who can infect someone else. There will always be some people who can’t or won’t get the vaccine - but if those people are spread out among a majority of vaccinated people, the unvaccinated will have little chance of encountering a the disease and even if they do encounter it and become ill, the disease will likely not spread further, because most people the sick person encounters will be vaccinated.
However, when there is a cluster of mostly unvaccinated people (for example, the school in this story), if any one of them happens to encounter the disease and become sick, almost everyone they encounter will become another link in a chain of infection, vastly increasing the chance that someone who is too young to be vaccinated, or has just had chemotherapy, or has a medical reason for not be vaccinated, or is one of the small percentage of people for whom the vaccine didn’t take, will encounter the disease and become ill. Unvaccinated people in clusters are far more dangerous to public health than unvaccinated people spread out in the community.
It’s in small print at the end of the article linked to in the OP. I think I got it at about the same time, when I was in 4th grade.
I suspect when we were in school vaccines were much more popular since the polio vaccine was new, but its reign of terror had been halted.
Another benefit of chickenpox vaccination is that the relatively few cases developing in vaccinated children tend to be milder.* As for effectiveness of the vaccine (quoting the CDC):
“In post-licensure studies, 2 doses of vaccine were 88% to 98% effective at preventing all varicella”.
Parents of kids at that Waldorf school who may have left children unvaccinated for good medical reasons were at the mercy of other parents who did not have such justification.
*Influenza is another example of a disease that often is milder if a person who is vaccinated gets it.
When the CP vaccine first came out, this is what worried me. It’s my understanding that booster shots are needed for this one. My worry was/is that as people get older, stop living with their parents etc, they may not see a doctor anywhere near regularly and lose their immunity to it, thus finding themselves susceptible to the adult version.
It should probably be kept in mind, like most of us I’d imagine, that I’m old enough to have gotten chicken pox with half the other kids in my class, and all my siblings. It itched and was annoying for a few days and it was over.
FTR, I didn’t know until a few years ago that you can’t get shingles unless you had CP.
That’s not a fair analogy though. You’d have to compare the deaths of kids that got a preventable disease to the deaths of kids that weren’t wearing seatbelts in a car accident.
Even that’s not quite fair since if one kid gets into a car accident it’s not that all his classmates will over the next week or two. IOW, it’s not contagious. I think far, far fewer people would care about the anti-vaxxers if they were avoiding vaccines for non-contagious illnesses.
I got chickenpox when I was a kid. The vaccine hadn’t yet been invented. Although chickenpox didn’t threaten my life, I was so miserable that it’s not something I’d wish on anyone. And yes, some react to it worse than others.