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The Problem With Vaccines
When a public health intervention is literally too good.
It’s uncommon that you need to convince someone over the age of 60 that vaccines are a good thing. While there are of course exceptions to this rule, if you ask the people in my father’s generation about whether they think vaccines are good they’ll usually say “hell, yes!”. They can tell you stories about the kid in their year at school who was permanently paralyzed from a case of polio, or the mum next door who lost a baby to whooping cough, or their friend who struggled to have kids after a nasty case of mumps as a child.
But in the decades since we developed childhood vaccines, these diseases have all but disappeared. Measles was famously eliminated in the United States way back in 2000. This doesn’t mean that the disease completely disappeared — the term for that is eradicated — it means that there are no ongoing outbreaks of measles in the country.
Prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine, the disease had a very well-understood trajectory. It’s a famous example of disease modelling that we still use today, because measles outbreaks in an unvaccinated population are remarkably predictable. In most populations, measles has a 2-year cycle where it infects most of the vulnerable children in the first year, then you get a year of low measles rates…
