Vaccination Rates Higher In War-Torn South Sudan Than in Many Affluent Los Angeles Schools

The Hollywood Reporter notes that
California has seen
over 8,000 cases of whooping cough so far this year, of which
267 required hospitalization, including 58 in intensive care. Three
infants under two months of age of died of the disease. Why?
Because rich, clueless idiots are refusing to get their kids
vaccinated.

The Hollywood Reporter checked filings for personal
belief exemptions in tony school districts and found:

The region stretching from Malibu south to Marina del Rey and
inland as far as La Cienega Boulevard (and including Santa Monica,
Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills)
averaged a 9.1 percent PBE level among preschoolers for the 2013-14
school year — a 26 percent jump from two years earlier. By
comparison, L.A. County at large measured 2.2 percent in that
period. Many preschools in this area spiked far higher, including
Kabbalah Children’s Academy in Beverly Hills (57 percent) and the
Waldorf Early Childhood Center in Santa Monica (68 percent).
According to World Health Organization data, such numbers are in
line with immunization rates in developing countries like Chad and
South Sudan.

Earlier this month the Los Angeles Times
investigated the falling vaccination rates among children in
various Southern California school districts. The reporters
found:

California parents are deciding against vaccinating their
kindergarten-age children at twice the rate they did seven years
ago, a fact public health experts said is contributing to the
reemergence of measles across the state and may lead to outbreaks
of other serious diseases.

The percentage of kindergartens in which at least 8% of students
are not fully vaccinated because of personal beliefs has more than
doubled as well, according to data on file with the state. That
threshold is significant because communities must be immunized at a
high rate to avoid widespread disease outbreaks. It is a concept
known as herd immunity, and for measles and whooping cough at least
92% of kids need to be immune, experts say. …

Exemption rates vary greatly by area and school. Los Angeles
Unified kindergartens, for example, had an overall exemption rate
of just 1.6%, although there are several in the district where more
than 8% of students have belief exemptions. At Santa Monica-Malibu
Unified, the overall exemption rate was 14.8% and at Capistrano
Unified in south Orange County, it was 9.5%. At nearby Santa Ana
Unified only 0.2% of kindergartners had exemptions on file.

In Los Angeles County, the rise in personal belief exemptions is
most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, The
Times analysis shows. The more than 150 schools with exemption
rates of 8% or higher for at least one vaccine were located in
census tracts where the incomes averaged $94,500 — nearly 60%
higher than the county median.

The article also reports in the Montecito District in Santa
Barbara that the exemption rate is 27.5 percent; Santa Cruz
Montessori it’s 22.6 percent.

While some might write off vaccine refusniks as voluntarily
engaging in Darwinian selection, the problem is that they are
putting others involuntarily at risk. As I explained elsewhere:

Vaccines do not always produce immunity, so a percentage of
those who took the responsibility to be vaccinated remain
vulnerable. Other defenseless people include infants who are too
young to be vaccinated and individuals whose immune systems are
compromised. In America today, it is estimated that about 10
million people are immuno-compromised through no fault of their
own.

This brings us to the important issue of “herd immunity.” Herd
immunity works when most people in a community are immunized
against an illness, greatly reducing the chances that an infected
person can pass his microbes along to other susceptible people.

People who refuse vaccination for themselves and their children
are free riding off of herd immunity. Even while receiving this
benefit, the unvaccinated inflict the negative externality of being
possible vectors of disease, threatening those 10 million most
vulnerable to contagion.

Vaccines are like fences. Fences keep your neighbor’s livestock
out of your pastures and yours out of his. Similarly, vaccines
separate people’s microbes. Anti-vaccination folks are taking
advantage of the fact that most people around them have chosen
differently, thus acting as a firewall protecting them from
disease. But if enough people refuse, that firewall comes down, and
innocent people get hurt.

Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle
when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other
man’s nose begins.” Holmes’ observation is particularly salient in
the case of whooping cough shots.

Infants cannot be vaccinated against whooping cough (pertussis),
so their protection against this dangerous disease depends upon the
fact that most of the rest of us are immunized. Unfortunately, as
immunization refusals have increased in recent years, so have
whooping cough infections. The annual number of pertussis cases
fell from 200,000 pre-vaccine to a low of 1,010 in 1976. Last year,
the number of reported cases rose to 48,277, the highest since
1955. Eighteen infants died of the disease in 2012, up from just
four in 1976.

For alternative opinions about vaccine refusal see
Reason’s debate, “Should
Vaccines Be Mandatory?“