Herd Immunity Through Vaccination

"Did you know your child can get measles by being in a room where a person with measles has been, even up to two hours after that person has left? Measles is very contagious, and it can be serious, especially for young children. Because measles is common in other parts of the world, unvaccinated people can get measles while traveling and bring it into the United States. Anyone who is not protected is at risk, so make sure to stay up to date on your child’s vaccines to minimize the risk of coming into contact with an imported case."
"Doctors recommend that your child get two doses of the MMR shot for best protection. Your child will need one dose at each of the following ages: 12 through 15 months and 4 through 6 years."
"Infants 6 to 11 months old should have one dose of the MMR shot before traveling abroad. Infants vaccinated before 12 months of age should be revaccinated on or after their first birthday with two doses, each dose separated by at least 28 days."
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

"Vaccines are more effective than almost any other medicine we use on a daily basis. Most people will be protected by most of the vaccines they receive, and some vaccines in the routine UK schedule are almost 100% effective against some diseases. For example, after two doses of MMR vaccine up to 99% of individuals will be protected from catching measles. However, there will always be a small number of people who fail to make an immune response to a particular vaccine. If their body has not made an immune response, then those people remain vulnerable to the disease."
Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford, Great Britain

"Some people assume that because diseases like polio have disappeared from the United States, it’s no longer necessary to vaccinate children against them. However, polio is still widespread in other parts of the world, and could easily begin re-infecting unprotected individuals if it were re-introduced to the country. Another example is measles, which has become rare in the United States: U.S. outbreaks of the disease have occurred when Americans traveling to countries where measles remains widespread brought the disease back with them. With adequate vaccination rates, most of these types of outbreaks can be prevented. But if vaccination rates drop, “imported” cases of preventable diseases can begin to spread again. In the early 2000s, for example, low vaccination rates in England allowed measles to become endemic once again after earlier vaccination rates had halted its continuous transmission in the country."
The History of Vaccines, College of Physicians of Pennsylvania

A crowd of people receives inactivated poliovirus vaccine in Protection, Kansas
March of Dimes Foundation

Those who hold fast to the belief that vaccines are dangerous and withhold them from their children are inadvertently turning their children into time bombs in the creation of an explosion of infectious diseases. An unvaccinated 11-year-old returning from a trip to Vietnam where he picked up the measles disease has been the vector for a measles outbreak in Western Canada. As a carrier of disease that child who was unvaccinated and thus vulnerable to picking up the infection became a weak link in an otherwise-protected population.

Aside from those who refuse vaccinations on grounds of believing them to be harmful and the cause of other diseases and health-adverse conditions refuted by science, there does exist an immune-compromised demographic that is so vulnerable they can be harmed to the point of death should they come in contact with an unvaccinated person in a day care setting, on a public bus or in a hospital ward. Infants are not to be vaccinated for the first few months of their lives; avoiding contact with the unvaccinated is critical for them.

People with compromised immune systems because of autoimmune diseases are also vulnerable since vaccines won't work for them, leaving them susceptible to infection. In most Western societies the aim is to ensure that over 90 percent of people have been immunized, creating a barrier to the transmission of infectious diseases and protecting the most vulnerable in society. This is known as "herd immunity". Once the rate of vaccination drops, infants and the immunosuppressed become more likely to come in contact with potential carriers of preventable infections.

Europe is at the present time considered the world centre for vaccine skepticism where in a 2016 survey up to 41 percent responding to a poll professed not to believe that vaccines are safe. The result has been outbreaks of preventable diseases where in the first six months of 2018, 41,000 Europeans were infected with measles, and 37 of them died of the disease. Many among the anti-vaxxers and the undecided believe that a disease such as measles poses no threat, yet one in five cases requires hospitalization and one in every 350 to 1,200 cases will be deadly.

Diphtheria was once the leading cause of childhood death in Canada. And in the United States 500 people annually were killed before the measles vaccine, and 48,000 others were hospitalized. The concern among health professionals is that even a deadly disease like poliomyelitis currently plaguing only small areas of Africa and Central Asia, could be re-introduced into North American schools and hospital wards. A single measles-infected person in 2015 after spending the day at Disneyland was the cause of an outbreak that left 147 people sick -- from Canada to Mexico -- to seven U.S. states.

Of 102 million doses of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine administered between 2006 to 2017 in the United States, only 120 resulted in payouts from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Adverse effects, when they occur from a vaccination rarely go beyond rashes, fever or other mild allergic reactions. It is rare (one in a million) that a vaccine will cause a lifelong disability.

In Canada, there are calls for mandatory vaccination of children; 70 percent of people claim it should be a requirement, to enter the public school system. One estimate has it that it is 5,000 times more potentially dangerous to become infected with measles than to receive the measles vaccine.

WND.com