Some election day thoughts on vaccination

November 5, 2024

Summary: Vaccines improve health and save lives.

Vaccinations improve health, save lives, and help maintain our economic productivity, but there has been a lot of non-evidence-based talk about vaccinations, particularly during this election season. Most of us are too young to remember when parents kept their children indoors in the summer for fear of polio, which paralyzed 21,000people in the US in 1953. Measles caused 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths a year before a vaccine became available. Because of vaccinations, I never saw a clinical case of measles in practice. There is absolutely no evidence that vaccinations cause autism, and the initial journal article that asserted this falsehood was retracted by The Lancet which noted that “major elements of the manuscript proved to be false.”

I feel especially strongly about vaccines in part because of two experiences when I was younger. My Boy Scout scoutmaster was confined to a wheelchair due to polio – he was infected in the early 1950s, just before a vaccine was available. The last case of paralytic polio acquired in the US was in 1979. As a college student, I served as a nursing aide at a residential facility for children with Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS), the result of their mother having rubella, usually a mild respiratory illness, during pregnancy. These children were adolescents, and they were blind, deaf, and most were unable to communicate. There are almost no cases of CRS in the US now, and there has been substantial progress in using vaccination to eliminate this disease worldwide.

I wrote a post in 2019 on the societal benefits of vaccination, and wanted to share some of the graphics to point to the important population health benefits of vaccination. These are screenshots from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Pink Book that was available in 2019 unless otherwise noted. Here’s a link to the current (2021) CDC Pink Book.

Source: CDC 2024

Rubella vaccine became available in 1969. During a 1964-1965 epidemic there were over 400,000 cases and 53 deaths. CRS= Congenital Rubella Syndrome.

Mumps vaccine was introduced in 1967, and the combined measles mumps rubella vaccine was introduced in 1971. The vaccine has been associated with a 99% decrease in incidence of mumps, which can cause hearing loss and male sterility and rarely causes brain swelling and death.

Polio vaccine first became available in 1954. All polio infections in the US now are imported from other countries. This post has resources for employers about polio.

Childhood vaccinations are also one of the few interventions that save more money in the medical system than they cost!  Most medical interventions are cost-effective, but childhood vaccines are cost-saving.

Newer vaccines for Human Papillomavirus can prevent cervical and throat cancers, and Hepatitis B vaccines can prevent liver cancer.

I’m hopeful that we will continue to prevent serious illness in children and adults by supporting vaccinations.

Thanks for reading.  You can find previous posts in the Employer Coverage archive

Please subscribe, “like” and suggest this newsletter to friends and colleagues. Thanks!

Tomorrow: IRS expands allowable preventive care without cost-sharing (by Patricia Toro, MD MPH)