Smallpox. Influenza. Measles. Rubella. The taboo names of the mysterious things that we cannot see, entities that once struck fear into the general public at their utterance. Only up until the advent of modern medicine would these diseases be seen as a near death sentence, with only the slightest hope of survival for the afflicted. Thankfully, to the enormous credit of the powerful scientific fields of human biology and public health, the average human being, from a physiological standpoint, is better off now than he or she was, say, 100 or 200 years ago.
The collective medical knowledge of our human anatomy and biology is expanding at an exponential rate, and with wonderful results; global infant mortality is generally decreasing, diseases are being cured, human life expectancy exhibits a general upward trend and the list goes on. But, there is still considerable work to be done, but not in the way most people would perhaps imagine.
Despite the growing wealth of accepted scientific knowledge and consensus, the astonishing ignorance of medical knowledge — and the firm grasp of that ignorance upon the minds of a sizable number of Americans — presents an unacceptable liability that can no longer be tolerated. Specifically, when it comes to the grassroots anti-vaccination movement, the arguments of personal freedom or the arguments of pseudoscience cannot be permitted to surpass the public health interest.
Every parent who refuses to vaccinate their child, where there exists an opportunity to in fact vaccinate the child, is indisputably a public health liability, however small that liability may be. The definitive target of the healthcare sector and the federal government is to diminish any such public health liability to as close as nothing. And the efforts of parents, either on medically uninformed or religious grounds, to act against that general welfare cannot be tolerated, considering the voluminous amount of scientific literature that promotes vaccinations for children.
Those with doubts can look for themselves at the expansive literature that is foundational to the practice of vaccinating children or can consult their doctor for the information regarding the safety of vaccinations. In fact, on their very website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has compiled vast amounts of research to effectively conclude that the misconceptions that persist in the minds of doubting parents are simply unreasonable, products of pseudoscience and lack scrutinized evidence.
What is most striking about the anti-vaccination movement is the demographic in which it most generally persists. Interestingly, on average, those individuals who do not vaccinate their children are economically wealthier, with annual incomes more than four times the poverty level. They are on average non-Hispanic whites, married couples in English-speaking households, educated with college degrees and are covered by private health insurance. The last characteristic is particularly puzzling, that those same people with the access to healthcare nevertheless reject that very same healthcare (that is, vaccines), and on what grounds?
Nevertheless, some critics of vaccinations might argue that the number of parents who are anti-vaccination is too small, too negligible or that their freedoms are constitutionally protected to necessitate an override of their will in the form of a federal piece of legislation. We need not examine the legal arguments for either side in this case. But the essence of the original argument overlooks the entire foundation of epidemiology, that all it takes is one person, patient zero, to precipitate a pressing public health crisis.
Recall the measles outbreak in 2015 that was linked to the Disneyland theme park in California, where 45 of the 110 measles patients were in fact unvaccinated. Or even more recently, where an anti-vaccination mother changed her stance when her three children fell sick to a disease that would have been otherwise prevented. Each of these cases is one too many, and they must raise alarms as to how such beliefs can persist in the face of an accumulated bulwark of scientific evidence.
Funny enough, as a general rule in the medical field, the best remedy for sickness is in fact prevention. The general public cannot afford to wait for an outbreak of measles (or any other vaccine-preventable illness for that matter) to provide the ex post facto arguments calling for lesser leeway for anti-vaccination. We must engage those with doubts, bring them to the side of evidence and reason for the greater public good.
