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Although Americans often think of vaccine hesitancy as primarily ideological, demographic, socio-economic, and educational factors may be even more powerful, and from what we can measure. , ideological factors are also moving relatively slowly. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the share of Americans who say vaccines should be required for all children attending school has fallen from 82 percent in 2019 to 71 percent in 2022, but The number of children claiming exemption from duty is increasing much more slowly. , which decreased to just 2.6% in the same year.
According to Pew, in 2016, 88% of Americans said the benefits of the MMR vaccine outweighed the risks, and 10% said they did not. This number was exactly the same in his 2019 on the eve of the pandemic, and it was exactly the same in his 2023 after the pandemic. I wrote about the stories we tell ourselves last summer).
The decline was about the same size in Europe, where the WHO blames a decline in vaccination rates as the main cause of recent outbreaks. The first dose of MMR vaccine decreased from 96 percent to 93 percent between 2019 and 2022, and the first dose of MMR vaccine decreased from 96 percent to 93 percent between 2019 and 2022. From 92 percent to 91 percent for the second dose. Official coverage rates were even higher in Russia and Kazakhstan. Actual premium rates may be lower, and perhaps much lower in certain demographic areas. This is a far more determinant of spread risk than the overall coverage figure. Nevertheless, in all these countries, including ours, the majority of people are vaccinated against diseases such as measles, and the majority continue to vaccinate their children against measles.
The problem is that vaccination levels do not need to be cut in half or even a quarter to cause an outbreak of a disease like measles. Diseases like measles are many times more contagious than the new coronavirus among people who have never been infected before. at first. (Early alarming estimates of its “reproduction number” suggest that for every new case of SARS-CoV-2 there could be 3.8 new cases, and for every new case of measles 12 (It was suggested that ~18 new cases could occur.) Even a somewhat invisible decline in vaccination rates could widen that possibility. Measles is not the only vulnerability that was once unthinkable. Experts have long called the disease a “tracer” virus, but its incredible transmissibility exposes gaps in vaccination rates and health care systems that could soon be exploited for other diseases. there is a possibility.
This is a major lesson from the spread of infection in Europe. Measles is a well-studied and analyzed virus to which we owe much of our fundamental knowledge about infectious diseases. But we don’t actually know the exact level of protection needed to prevent, or simply keep at bay, infection in the real world, only a rough sense of the range. Protection can result in uncontrollable transmissions that are extremely dangerous.
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