Vaccine Rejection: Truth and Consequences
Welcome to Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on February 20, 2019. I’m Steve Mirsky.
Headline, The Guardian newspaper, February 12th: Measles outbreak in Philippines kills 70, with vaccine fearmongering blamed.
Headline, CBS News, February 10th: Number of People with Measles Tripled in Europe in 2018, WHO says. In the article, this sentence: More than 82,000 people in Europe contracted the virus, which killed 72 people.
And again from CBS news, reporting from Washington State, this headline, February 8th: Hundreds rally to preserve right not to vaccinate children amid measles outbreak. The rally is a response to a bill that would take away the state’s provision to allow parents to opt out of measles vaccines for kids for “philosophical reasons.” The good news there is that in the region where the outbreak has occurred, vaccines rates rose some 500 percent.
Before these headlines ran, there were other cases of outbreaks traced to unvaccinated kids. So I called Tara Smith. She’s an epidemiologist at Kent State University’s College of Public Health. In 2017 she published an article in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases titled “Vaccine Rejection and Hesitancy: A Review and Call to Action.” We spoke by phone.
SMITH SEGMENT
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