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A comment on The high price of mistrust. Parent comment

Re:The high price of mistrust by jnwatson on Monday January 25, 2021 @01:56PM (#25907109)
In the decade immediately before the measles vaccine was distributed in the US, an average of 495 deaths per year and 1000 people severly disabled (1). In modern per-capita US terms, that would be like 866 deaths (mostly children) and 1750 disabled. While that's not much compared to COVID, it is about 1/6 as many deaths as polio in its worst year in the US, and that was a widely feared virus.

The Measles vaccine is also a proxy for other behavior. Minimally, in the US, folks that aren't innoculated for measles probably aren't innoculated for mumps or rubella (as MMR is one vaccine), or other important vaccines altogether.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023051702/https://www.cdc.g...

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Re:The high price of mistrust by Nasrudith on Monday January 25, 2021 @03:05PM (#25908040)
There is also the sick irony (no pun intended). The anti-vaxers are preventing a phase out of a vaccine by their actions. If measles got nationally eradicated or better yet internationally (a slow laborious process sadly) - it would mean fewer vaccines because it did its job perfectly.
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