It was proudly declared “eliminated” by the Center for Disease Prevention in 2000 after four decades’ worth of battle in the medical industry.

A measles outbreak in California has infected over 100 people, prompting fears of sustained transmission once again becoming a possibility.  Starting in Disneyland, the infection spread throughout pockets of unvaccinated individuals and is now a national concern.  Entire daycare centers have shut down because their children are too young to be immunized, and though babies and adults alike have been quarantined in efforts to curb the spread of the outbreak, measles cases have sprouted in New Mexico and Nevada already.  The outbreak has cost the state of California over $5.3 million in medical bills and quarantining costs.  It’s been a disaster.

But even the largest surge in measles in decades doesn’t hold a candle to what the virus used to be.  An old adage once said that measles was as inevitable as death and taxes.  In addition to being frightfully contagious, measles also proved to be one of the biggest killers even leading into the 1900s and leaving many of its survivors comatose.  The infection once killed a fifth of Hawaii’s population and a third of Fiji’s population in under a decade – the success of the first measles vaccine in 1954 was hailed as one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments of the 20^th century.  An estimated 900,000 lives are saved every year because of the MMRV vaccine, a significant fraction of the approximately 3 million saved by vaccines annually.

But in spite of measles’ past and the incredible success of the vaccine, a still-growing population of people supports the anti-vaccination movement.  They claim that natural infection is better than vaccination and that the vaccine schedule for children is overwhelming enough to cause disorders such as autism.  They see words such as “mercury” or “thimerosal” and make grand assumptions ungrounded in science.  Although I won’t delve into the mountain of research supporting vaccines almost without exception (a simple Google search more than suffices), none of these reasons hold water to the thousands of studies conducted investigating the safety of vaccines.  The most prevalent reason, though, and the most contemptible in my opinion, is “herd immunity.”

If parents believe their children will be protected by other children’s vaccinations, they are violating the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Do they want a return to a society where no child is vaccinated?  Does anyone really want a return to pre-vaccine America?  Or are they merely content to let other parents’ children suffer from the mental diseases that they believe vaccines cause?  The hypocrisy of the argument is only matched by its ineffectiveness; the recent case in California has been directly caused by the “anti-vaxxer” community becoming too large; more than 2/3 of the California victims were not vaccinated.

Their mantra, “Educate yourself,” is laughable once understood to mean, “Educate yourself on anti-vaccine propaganda.”  But the anti-vaccine movement does have the right intent, just a sorely misinformed execution
— educate yourself, and don’t let rhetoric and propaganda sway your perception of the facts on vaccines.  Whether you’re a conservative or liberal, male or female, old or young, Republican or Democrat, this is not a political issue: the capacity to bring diseases like measles back from virtual extinction is not a choice any parent should have.