To think there shouldn't be measles outbreaks?

[fatandhappy47]

Surely we shouldn't be having an issue with measles?
Had an email from school (secondary) 'reminding' us to keep kids off with measles, which got me thinking

All my kids band my friends kids of the same age had their MMR (however my youngest did get measles before this)

So why is it an issue in secondary schools of all places? Are people just not vaccinating their kids?

That's the thing though... I imagine parents don't think they 'know enough' about measles itself OR the vaccine to combat it... that's why they opt out.

This was particularly true of the Covid jab. A lot of people - experts included - admitted to knowing practically ZERO about this novel virus. Yet those same people were happy - and encouraged - to have a medical intervention that they (and experts!) also knew very little about.

So, I imagine a lot of people thought they would 'take their chances' with the virus they knew nothing about about, rather than a medical intervention.

@Sweden99 The latter grou are ego-maniacs who think them not being the expert is more important than them being open to learning or accepting that people who work with it know more.
Frankly, the latter group need less patience and more of a shoeing.

An antivaxxer tried to convince me once that the “man-made” aluminium in vaccines was completely different to “natural” aluminium…

What I can never get my head around is how it is that I will read a whole bunch of studies on something and, despite a degree in chemistry, will end up feeling like I still don’t know enough to make a properly informed decision - and yet people without any kind of background in science seem to have total conviction in their beliefs based on one thing they read once. I remember last year when scarlet fever was rife seeing several people quote a study “proving” it was caused by the nasal flu vaccine - but they hadn’t noticed the study was twelve years old, was done on mice, and concerned a different bacterium with a similar name.

Thick as shit antivaxxers are the sole reason for this.

Not the sole reason.
Vaccinated kids are getting measles.
Measles vax as a single jab was more effective than the triple jab - or at least that’s what I concluded when I was getting my older teens the single jabs years and years ago.

today you can still pay privately for a single measles jab and a rubella jab. You just can’t get the mumps singly.

It’s not an anti-vax/Andrew Wakefield issue. Given the areas the problem’s concentrated in, it’s clearly a cultural/religious problem.

Doesn't he just. The damage he has caused is irreparable.

Not the sole reason.
Vaccinated kids are getting measles.
Very few vaccines, if any, will be 100% effective.
But if everyone (or 90-95% of the population) is vaccinated, and the vaccine is, say 90% effective, the chance of an epidemic happening is very small: the disease won't be able to infect enough people to replicate and will fizzle out.
But if you have a large unvaccinated pool through which it is spreading, it will keep on going and will infect some of the people who have been vaccinated.

It's not just that. All the anti vaxxers I know are white British.

You can get away with a small rump of anti-vaxxers plus children with legitimate medical contraindications and members of tiny fringe religions as long as they're evenly spread across the community.

The pork gelatine issue is much more problematic because it's not evenly spread across the population, so it can cause immunisation levels in a specific area to fall below herd immunity levels. It looks like public health officials have really taken their eye off the ball and need to do some urgent remedial work asap.

There is an interesting article in the Times - the useless share token thing doesn't seem to work but its called
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/measles-children-mmr-vaccine-jab-parents-adults-djbgdgfn9

The thing is, a degree in chemistry does not qualify you to make the decision. You are relying on other people to inform you. But you have the limitiations and acceptance of your knowledge and the anti-vaxxers are not willing to make that acceptance.
If they were, listening to people who have actually worked with this or grifters on YouTube would be a clear cut choice.

The job of science is not really to be right about everything, but to produce a model that is less wrong.
There will always be doubt, but choosing being more wrong is clearly silly.

Another reason is immunity. I had my MMR immunity levels checked for occ health at university, I had no immunity to measles or rubella (only mumps) despite having all the vaccinations

The scientists who developed the vaccines were not amongst those experts who felt the knew nothing about this virus. They all had been studying the family of viruses that Covid-19 belongs to for some time before it's emergence. If they had not then getting an effective vaccine developed in the timescales that were achieved would have been impossible.

However, you have outlined the faulty logic based on a very partial understanding of what was known by whom that probably underlines at least some if the vaccine hesitancy we see reasonably well.

I've not read the whole thread, so apologies if this has already been said!

The R value (reproduction ratio) for measles is about 18-19. For ease, let's call it 20. That means on average someone who catches measles passes it onto 20 more.

In order to get R down to 1 (and prevent exponential growth and outbreaks) you need to vaccinated 19 out of every 20 people. That's 95%, which means there isn't a lot of room for anri-vaxers, people who didn't get around to it etc.

Vaccination rates are at about 85% so the vast majority are vaccinated, just not enough to stop the outbreaks

That’s not even taking into account when people remain non-immune or their immunity wanes significantly to the point they’re now non-immune

There definitely needs to be MMR immunity tests done in areas of outbreak following by a repeated MMR course given if negative or non-immune, then re-checking bloods.

Mine was a very simplistic model, but the fact that R for measles is actually a little lower than 20 means that 95% is about right when you take into account the small percentage of people fur which the vaccine doesn't work.

95% is a huge proportion of people you are trying to get to do something even if they all think it's a good idea!

There isn't a single rubella vaccine now either so the only single vaccine is for measles.

There is a combined measles and rubella or the MMR

Many parents who haven't let their DC be vaccinated will have had their MMR themselves before Andrew Wakefield's "research" so won't have been aware of the dangers of measles because they won't have encountered measles. DC23 was born around the time of that "research" but we had friends in our circle who were doctors and I knew that they had had their DC vaccinated and that was sufficient reassurance for me.
DC20 went to a school nursery with a boy who was autistic and quite severely affected by it (at 5 he was non-verbal and still in nappies). I got quite friendly with his DM and she told me that she had been hesitant about letting him have the MMR because of the "research" but she already knew that her DS probably had autism because of his development so she let him have it.

This is why (as a teacher) I’d like to see various bits of the science curriculum scrapped in favour of teaching kids how to interpret and understand science in the media. Few of those kids will ever use their knowledge of electrolysis again, but they would use their skills in analysing statistics and studies all the time.

(Edited to add that there is a brief mention of the importance of peer review in the course I teach, but with the amount of content we have to get through there is nowhere near enough time to give it the weight it deserves.)

Yes, it’s because some people haven’t vaccinated their kids. Idiots.

When I vaccinated my child my cousin sent me an email with lots of dodgy links about supposed side effects of vaccines. I sent her an email back of what a kid with a nasty case of measles looks like.

Vaccines aren’t perfect but they’re better than the diseases.

Well said @ZebraDanios 👏

@EverleighMay Your GP will be able to provide you with your vaccinations record. Mine did.

It’s scary, I have seen professional nurses posting anti vax things in friends feeds. When I commented about this nonsense, they just replied they are taking it to pms (presumably to stop third parties debunking it).