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Didn't We Already Beat Measles?


Signs posted at The Vancouver Clinic in Vancouver, Wash., warn patients and visitors of a measles outbreak on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019.

Signs posted at The Vancouver Clinic in Vancouver, Wash., warn patients and visitors of a measles outbreak on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019.


Photo:

Gillian Flaccus/Associated Press

Many conservatives are fond of an old T.S. Eliot line: There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. The latest proof of that second truth is the Pacific Northwest’s outbreak of measles, a disease scrubbed from the U.S. nearly 20 years ago.

There are now 53 measles cases confirmed for Clark County in Washington, which sits across the river from Portland, Ore. Almost all of those sickened are children who didn’t receive their vaccines. The authorities have published a list of possible “exposure sites” that infected people visited: a Trail Blazers basketball game, a Walmart Supercenter and the Portland International Airport.

Clark County says only 78% of its children age 6 to 18 have received the recommended two doses of the MMR vaccine, for measles, mumps and rubella. A few are exempt for medical or religious reasons. But parents in Washington—and 16 other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures—can also claim “philosophical” or “personal” objections.

Most of the exemptions in Clark County are this sort. The trend is driven by misinformation and debunked fears that vaccines may not be safe. (They are.)

Last week the Washington state Legislature took up a bill to delete the personal exemption. “Hundreds of people opposed to the measure lined up more than an hour before the start of the hearing,” the AP reported. The antivaccine crankRobert F. Kennedy, Jr. was on hand to spin out conspiracies and share his theory on “the cure for most infectious measles, which is Vitamin A.”

The Taliban has sometimes interfered with polio vaccination in Afghanistan. Grotesque, yes. Yet here we are with 50 American kids needlessly fighting measles. Most of them, the county says, have “a wild strain of virus circulating in Eastern Europe.” Lest we forget—human progress is not guaranteed.



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