This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
This isn't so much an opinion as a statement of medical fact, but apparently, it needs to be said. The school year is starting. Vaccinate your kids, damnit. Vaccines are good for them.
The Colorado Department of Public Health makes available vaccination statistics for every school in the state. The state website is great -- it automatically generates charts and graphs to make understanding the data easy. I decided to pull the statistics for the Saint Vrain Valley School District, and for the most part, the results are encouraging. Students in the public schools are up to date on their vaccines 89% of the time. This is a big improvement over 2015 when the public schools had an average 82% vaccination rate.
While a 7% increase may not seem like a lot, because of how herd immunity works it's a significant buffer against disease spread. Herd immunity protects all of us against diseases even if a small fraction of us don't get the vaccine. It allows us to protect those people whose religious beliefs forbid vaccines, or the immune compromised, the very young and very old for whom the vaccine might be dangerous. There are some great "games" online which allow you to play with vaccination rates and see how disease spreads. The University of Pittsburgh has a great website which allows you to simulate measles outbreaks in different communities depending on vaccination rate.
Herd immunity cannot help communities, or sub-communities, who forego vaccination. Even if you live in a bubble where everyone else has received the vaccine, there is still a risk of getting sick. Vaccines aren't always effective in everyone, so even a fraction of those who receive the vaccine can contract and transmit the disease. The risk of illness is multiplied when unvaccinated people form a sub-community that is infrequent, close contact.
Let's be forthright about who I'm talking about: Rich people and private schools. For reasons passing understanding, rich people and people who send their children to private schools (...the rich...) in this community have decided that their personal beliefs make it okay to put the rest of us, and children in this community, at risk. There are deadly, preventable diseases out there that ravaged humanity for thousands of years. We've found a way to make sure that some of the worst of them don't! But some rich people believe stupid, fear-mongering stories about vaccines and are choosing to exempt their children from school vaccination requirements.
There are three private schools with outrage-inducing levels of "personal exemptions." Vista Ridge Academy and Rocky Mountain Christian Academy are each near 10%. Boulder Valley Waldorf School, the most expensive of them all, is downright dangerous at a 50.4% exemption rate. A single child who contracts whooping cough from a stranger during the family ski trip to Aspen could literally put the lives of every child in the school at risk because of the absence of herd immunity in that community. Lest you think that only private schools are disease infested wastelands, the Apex Home School Enrichment Program is another haven for medical science denying parents with a 25% exemption rate. Also dangerous are Lyons Elementary, Central Elementary and the Imagine Charter at 10.6%, 9% and 8% respectively. The administrators and parents of all of those schools should be ashamed of themselves.
These risks and consequences are not theoretical. Low vaccination rates caused an outbreak of measles in Disneyland in 2015. MEASLES! This is what measles looks like. That disease killed 73,000 people last year, primarily in places with low vaccination rates. Why wouldn't you take that disease seriously? Here are pictures of children with polio. And here is an infant being comforted by her mother as she struggles to breathe due to whooping cough.
There is literally no legitimate non-medical, non-religious reason for not vaccinating your kids. I don't care what lies you read on Facebook about autism. I don't care if you think your child is a special snowflake. I don't care if your child is protected by a strict yoga protocol which aligns their immune chakras around a mystical quartz gemstone. Vaccinate your damn kids. For their sake, and for the rest of us.
