Don't Assume You're Safe from Measles, Even if You're Vaccinated

They keep telling us not to worry.

By now, you probably know about the measles epidemic spreading in West Texas and New Mexico, plus rising cases in Canada. You know the ridiculous things RFK Jr. has offered, including his reluctance to push for vaccines and his proclivity for things like cod-liver oil and Vitamin A. As Katherine Wu writes in The Atlantic, the HHS “is overinflating the importance of those supplements… cod-liver oil is flying off the shelves, while some parents are doubling down on their hesitations over vaccines.” Of course, N95 masks haven’t even entered the chat…

Measles most likely emerged in the 6th century BCE, and since then “it has adapted perfectly to the human species, becoming strictly human, without animal reservoirs.” It was a menace to civilization for thousands of years, with the first medical descriptions emerging as early as the 10th century CE. At one point, measles accounted for roughly half of all infant deaths by infectious disease. It was considered nearly inevitable that young children would catch it.

We’ve been fighting it for a long time.

Before vaccination, measles caused 3-4 million infections a year in the U.S. and killed one in 1,000 patients. For the unvaccinated, it has a case fatality rate of about 1-2 percent. But it can hospitalize roughly 1 in 5 patients, and 1 in 20 develop pneumonia. According to a 2019 study in Science, it can also cause immune amnesia in up to 73 percent of those it infects. Getting measles makes you much more vulnerable to other infections for months, even years down the road. According to John Barry’s history of the 1918 pandemic, it was measles outbreaks in the trenches of WWI that laid the groundwork for the H1N1 flu’s deadly mutations. “It is the most contagious infectious disease I know of in humans,” says one epidemiologist. If you’re in the same room with someone who has measles, and you’re not protected, you have a 90 percent chance of catching it. While doctors run out of vaccines in Texas, some parents are trying to reboot measles parties. That seems like a bad idea. But you don’t have to worry about that because you’re vaccinated, right?

If you believe that…

Think again.