
The Worst Measles Outbreak In The European Union - dsr12
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/11/24/669228140/the-story-behind-the-worst-measles-outbreak-in-the-european-union
======
notacoward
I was close to a potential measles outbreak this summer. Close enough that had
to be tested because my vaccination decades ago in another country was
considered insufficient. (I was found to be already immune, as expected, but
got a booster anyway.) I also got to work with epidemiologists who were
working to contain things, and fortunately the outbreak did fizzle out . So I
take this issue pretty personally.

Whatever people's concerns about vaccines might be, and I'll concede that
manufacturers' lack of transparency about ingredients and adverse-reaction
risks is part of the problem, those _totally_ pale in comparison to the
importance of maintaining herd immunity to prevent the disease itself from
spreading. There are people who are too young to be immunized, or who have
conditions that preclude it. Also, vaccines do fail. The current rate is
around 2% and that's what led to the case I was involved in. There is a _very
small_ chance that someone will avoid problems that might have occurred if
they'd had their children vaccinated. There's a _much larger_ chance that in
the process they'll put someone else's child at risk. It's stealing others'
lives for their own, so I think it's quite reasonable to compare vaccine
refuseniks to vampires. Don't be a vampire. Get your damn shots, make your
sure children get their damn shots, and do your part to keep this _killer_
from roaming around freely.

~~~
downer60
It's great to say "but what about the children" and all, but immunized
individuals really don't need to involve themselves in the lives of those
choosing to avoid medical treatment.

By definition, the immune won't be harmed by my choice to not immunize myself.
If I get sick, and you are immune, my choice to take risks won't harm you.

If you're worried about those other than yourself, who might be harmed by my
hypothetical decision to risk illness and injury, your advice should be
phrased to them as an audience.

Meanwhile, the waters are still muddier. There are a wide array of other
terrible personal choices that are defended maximally, despite conceptual harm
being part of the package. The choice to consult a doctor, or not, the choice
to not be resuscitated, to not seek treatment for terminal diseases, to not
suffer treatment when quality of life is not rewarding.

All of these choices matter as much as choosing to have a child at all.
Ultimately, I think some children would be better off as orphans in foster
care, but I'm not about to try and make that happen. I think it's more about
letting nature take its course.

The immune live. The others die. Darwin's theory prevails.

~~~
notacoward
> If you're worried about those other than yourself, who might be harmed by my
> hypothetical decision to risk illness and injury, your advice should be
> phrased to them as an audience.

That's ridiculous. Those people are doing all they can, considering their
conditions. It's the people who are _not_ doing all they can, exposing others
to danger so they can satisfy their own contrarian "smarter/greener than
everyone else" self-image, who need the message.

> There are a wide array of other terrible personal choices that are...

...irrelevant. That's just concern trolling.

> The immune live. The others die. Darwin's theory prevails.

Victim-blaming and concern trolling were bad enough, but now we're into
eugenics. If you want to talk about "terrible personal choices" that should
make the list.

~~~
downer60
You're using a lot of internet argument buzz words, but none of them
invalidate my position.

More to the point: people get to make choices. That's what being a person
means.

Either you let people choose, or you put them on a feedlot, admit that this is
a factory farm, and openly ply them with antibiotics and horomones, so you can
milk them longer, before putting the bolt gun to their head and serving their
remains at McDonald's.

~~~
cmurf
Using your own logic, we should let healthy people choose to execute those who
aren't immunized the instant they contract disease. It's self-defense, just
let people choose.

Obviously that's absurd. There is a line drawn in any civil society, to keep
it civil. If people want to opt out of immunizations, it should be legal and
obligatory to eject them from society: they do not get to go to school in
public schools, they can be discriminated against in hiring, they can be
excluded from health care programs whether private or public insurance - until
they comply. That is absolutely civil behavior, and it's reasonable. And they
can still choose whether to participate in civil society or not.

And we have very nearly that policy. But the problem in the U.S. is religious
exemptions. The flaw with the current coddling of religious folk, is that a
person's right to religious freedom cannot be permitted to increase the risk
to other people's lives. And yet it does, and we tolerate it so far.

The only people who should be exempt from immunizations are those who are
immune compromised in a way that their life is at greater risk by being
immunized.

------
beefman
Better source: [http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/fatal-inaction-
how-m...](http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/fatal-inaction-how-measles-
made-a-comeback-11-30-2017)

------
Angostura
> In France, for instance, 41 percent of those surveyed said vaccines are not
> safe — more than three times the global average of 12 percent.

That’s a pretty astonishing statistic

~~~
nyandaber
But they're not safe. Like any kind of medication, there's a risk of hidden
effects or bad reaction that could and do happen. Rather than trying to lie, I
think it's better to be honest about the possible side effects, and
communicate about the nasty diseases we don't have to deal with thanks to
those vaccines. Most anti-vaccines are stuck on the possible danger of
vaccine, and aren't balancing it with all the benefits that come because we
forgot how bad those diseases were.

~~~
wolf550e
The risk is something on the order of 1 child per million dies (or gets a
lasting severe outcome, IIRC). That's ~4 children per year in the US, traded
for the lives of millions.

------
acd
An issue that there is alternative fear truths spreading on the internet as
they are real facts when they are not.

With vaccines a majority of the population need to be vaccinated that prevents
the disease from spreading.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity)

Here is a graph of Measeles in the United states. Before and after vaccine.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#/media/File:Meas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#/media/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset.png)

"Vaccine controversies have occurred since almost 80 years before the terms
vaccine and vaccination were introduced. Despite overwhelming scientific
consensus[1][2] that vaccines are safe and effective,[3] unsubstantiated
scares regarding their safety still occur, resulting in outbreaks and deaths
from vaccine-preventable diseases."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversies)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation)

~~~
cmroanirgo
The thing is, as a kid we got measles and we got time off school (Yay!), but
we'd get a booster shot at the time and the wheels of society keep turning as
we'd stay at home until we got well enough to go back. I got mumps, german
measles and a variety of things kids nowdays get vaccinated for. I've had the
chicken pox 3 times and it's relative, shingles, twice (somehow my immune
system doesn't learn this one!).

So...why is there now all this fuss to be pre-vaccinated? To me it's like the
tetanus shot, if you get pricked by a bit of rusty metal and it's been 10
years, you go and get a shot.

One of the main things that I can think of is that due to a modern society,
both parents are working and absolutely need to send their kids to school.
This of course can be a big problem without a mandatory, herd-immunity system
in place.

> unsubstantiated scares regarding their safety still occur

This is probably because they're not exactly unsubstantiated:

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy_investiga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy_investigations_in_the_European_Union)

\- [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-23/the-fallout-from-a-
ba...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-23/the-fallout-from-a-batch-of-flu-
vaccine/2347906)

~~~
slavak
What does "pre-vaccinated" mean in this context, exactly? Vaccinations only
come in the "pre" variety; once you've caught the disease, vaccination is
unlikely to do any good. Some diseases (e.g.: rabies) have a long enough
incubation period that post-exposure prophylaxis is effective, but this is
very much the exception.

Sure, kids can get measles, and they'll probably be just fine. Measles only
has a 0.1%-0.2% mortality rate, after all... On the other hand, that means 1-2
of every 1,000 children who get the disease will die a completely pointless
and preventable death.

------
JetSpiegel
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=669228140](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=669228140)

Text version for us Europeans, blessed by GDPR.

------
Waterluvian
Can't we just make it really @#$_ing inconvenient to decline vaccines? Bar
kids from school and whatnot. Wouldn't this filter people who anti-vax only
when it's convenient?

I have a sense that a lot of anti-vaxers would change their tone if it's
actually inconvenient every day to be one. But I don't have the facts on this
one and can't find anything with a short Google.

~~~
roel_v
Yes, this is the approach in e.g. Belgium and Germany.

------
HarryHirsch
The gem is in the accompanying paper:
[https://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964(16)30398-X/f...](https://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964\(16\)30398-X/fulltext)

They are asking about safety and effectiveness, and in France there has been a
debate about the HPV and Hep B vaccination, yet French children are still
mostly properly immunized. The big European measles outbreaks happen in
hardline Dutch Reformed communities.

~~~
adventured
> The big European measles outbreaks happen in hardline Dutch Reformed
> communities.

That's definitely not correct. Greece had the most cases of measles in the EU
over the last year, at 3,049. France had 2,771. Italy had 2,599. Romania had
1,821. The UK had 1,019. Germany had 542. Slovakia had 471.

Ukraine had 23,000+ in just the first half of the year. That's not a problem
with dutch communities.

The biggest outbreaks over the last 10-15 years in Europe have occurred in
Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, France.

------
partycoder
You can all thank Andrew Wakefield, the physician that published the
fraudulent paper that linked vaccines to autism.

"Immunization rates in Britain dropped from 92 percent to 73 percent, and were
as low as 50 percent in some parts of London."

Then he directed a documentary against vaccination, making things even worse.

------
xvilka
Easy to solve - just calculate the economical and moral expenses of the
outbreak, split them between all anti-vax proponents and make them pay.

~~~
mort96
What would you write down as the exact monetary value of a human life? How do
you arrive at that number?

~~~
YokoZar
The same way any large policy maker does. This is a recurrent theme in social
science, as you have to make big decisions such as whether it's worth spending
an extra billion dollars on a slightly safer bridge.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)

~~~
mort96
I don't know if that feels entirely applicable. People who advocate that
people shouldn't vaccinate their children simply increase the chance of large
amounts of people dying from preventable disease; if they didn't, nothing
would've been lost. Calculating how much should be spent on a bridge, on the
other hand, is simply necessary in a world where there is demand for bridges
even though there's not enough resources to ensure that both enough bridges
are built, and that every single bridge is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

------
purplethinking
I'll use this as an opportunity to plead for some rebuttal to the anti-
vaxxers' arguments. My wife doesn't want to vaccinate our child so this very
personal. She's highly educated, knows statistics and reads research papers,
but is now convinced by the arguments of this movement. The thing is that no
debunking source I've found on vaccines does much to address their arguments,
which include, but are not limited to:

* the profit incentive of the vaccine manufacturers

* herd immunity being questionable

* dangerous substances in the vaccines (mercury)

* the effectiveness of vaccines at all being in question

* the decline of disease mainly being due to better sanitation and conditions rather than vaccines

The whole autism thing is really a minor part of it. There are many arguments
backed up by various cherry-picked research articles or spread by a few anti-
vaxxing doctors and even previous researchers, just like with global warming.

What I need is some rebuttal, that is not by some random blogger, that
addresses all their concerns without treating the anti-vaxxer as a high-school
dropout stay at home mom. At this point the problem is much wider than a few
uneducated people spreading nonsense.

Edit: interesting that I'm getting hammered with down-votes. If you're down
voting, is it because this is too personal, off topic or what? I think the
answer to my question can be very helpful to others facing similar situations.

~~~
jlangenauer
Well, there's these visualisations about polio and measles in the United
States, which are very compelling for the last two points.

[http://www.randalolson.com/2016/03/04/revisiting-the-
vaccine...](http://www.randalolson.com/2016/03/04/revisiting-the-vaccine-
visualizations/)

~~~
megous
Better sanitation as a reason would lead to cutoff lines to be not so sharp
and to be around the same time for most diseases. I guess. So this throws
serious doubt on better sanitation being a reason for decline in diseases.

