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MEASLES: Soon, a Rash of Lawsuits?
Mary G. Barry, MD
Louisville Medicine Editor
[email protected]
B
y February 10th in Clark County,
Wash., 54 people had contract-
ed measles from one index case,
and four cases had appeared in
nearby Portland, Ore. By the end
of January in New York, the case rate was
climbing to 200, primarily clustered in Or-
thodox communities’ yeshivas and in one
Evangelical academy. At least 10 states have
active cases of measles. In 2018 we had more
measles cases than any year since 2000,
when we declared the disease practically
eliminated in this country. This was due to
mass vaccination programs enforced by the
public school system. Non or weak enforcers
of the system include schools operated by
particular faith groups. No major religion,
I note, has taken any stand, ever, against
vaccination. Small groups, a sect of Protes-
tants in the Netherlands for instance, prefer
their own interpretations of religious rule,
and have recently suffered fatal outbreaks
of measles.
Health officials believe that the index
cases in the Orthodox communities were
unvaccinated children who acquired mea-
sles while traveling to Israel in September.
Unvaccinated travelers from the US who
visit Italy, Ukraine, Israel and Moldova right
now can bring home measles. All affected
states currently have a religious exemption:
parents can choose not to vaccinate their
children for reasons of religious practice.
Please recall that effective herd immuni-
ty requires a community vaccination rate
over 90 percent, ideally at least 95. In the
involved New York and Washington com-
munities, measles vaccination rates in the
affected schools were found to be only 47
to 60 percent.
In Kentucky, the religious exemption
also exists. The exemption form lists all of
the state-required vaccinations followed by
the statement, “Due to my religious beliefs,
I object to my child receiving the required
immunizations selected above. I am aware
that if I change my mind I can rescind this
objection and obtain immunizations for
my child.”
As of last week, because of the severity
of the outbreak in Washington state, legis-
lators were putting together a bill to remove
the religious exemption. As of February 10,
the vaccination rate for Clark County had
jumped by nearly 600 percent. In Williams-
burg and in other parts of Brooklyn, public
health clinics and private doctors’ offices
were opening on weekends to get people
vaccinated and were swamped.
However, as those who care for children
know all too well, the driving force in this
country for refusing to vaccinate children is
willful belief in misinformation. Too many
parents believe that vaccines are potentially
harmful to the child; so potentially harmful
that parents successfully avert their eyes
from centuries of childhood death from
vaccine-preventable illnesses. The false flag
of autism is planted deeply in their paren-
tal minds, so firmly that they are able to
fantasize that their children will never get
sick. Their children will never go blind, deaf
or mute from measles. They won’t die of
pneumonia from measles. They will not
be exposed to measles and get SSPE (Sub-
acute Sclerosing Panencephalitis), which is
uniformly fatal but only after long years of
suffering. These parents believe that their
children will not choke to death from Diph-
theria, break a rib coughing from Pertussis,
get meningitis from Mumps, or paralysis
and lifelong disability from Polio.
So they think. But what happens if their
child gets sick or makes another child sick?
What happens if their sick child makes an-
other child so disabled that the cost of caring
for that child soars into the millions?
With these new outbreaks, that question
is once again legally on the table. Professor
of Law Dorit Rubenstein Reiss (J.D. from
Berkeley), who serves on the faculty at UC
(continued on page 26)
MARCH 2019
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