"As we race to build global immunity against covid-19, we’re losing ground against diseases we’ve already defeated. There are two reasons for this: growing vaccine hesitancy as a result of the politicization of coronavirus vaccines, and the disruption of routine childhood inoculation.We cannot let this persist. Health officials — and the public at large — must shore up our defenses against all diseases and keep routine childhood vaccination requirements from becoming enmeshed in our growing ideological divide.All vaccines work in two ways: First, they build immune memory to help protect against infectious diseases and reduce our ability to transmit them. Second, they reduce the chance we come across anyone else with the disease through the same mechanism (particularly important for vulnerable people, such as the elderly or immunocompromised). That means vaccines work best when they have high rates of population uptake."
Continue reading the article online. (Subscription maybe required)
|A measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is seen t a pediatrics clinic in Greenbrae, Calif., in February 2015. (Eric Risberg/AP)|