In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that more than 90 percent of the children infected in last year’s measles outbreak in Ohio were unvaccinated.
The report published Friday looked at the 85 total confirmed cases, all among children located in central Ohio, and found 94 percent of them did not receive the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. Additionally, 80 out of the 85 cases were in children under the age of 5, according to Columbus Public Health.
[The] reality of measles as a disease that strikes almost uniquely in childhood is changing. The shift is driven in part by the fact that the first wave of children whose parents shunned vaccination in the late 1990s and early 2000s — in response to a fallacious, since-retracted study in the Lancet that linked measles vaccine to autism — are now in young adulthood.
A recent report from the United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency suggested the growing pool of non-immune adults — known as susceptibles in the lexicon of epidemiology — could fuel future measles outbreaks.
There is also a growing body of adults in this country who have no immunity against measles, experts say. In fact, since the year 2000, about 40% of measles cases in the U.S. have been in adults, with about one-quarter in people aged 20 to 29.
