With vaccine skepticism increasing, the risk of new and deadly outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles is on the rise. A new study from Stanford University shows how bad things could get.
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Thanks to vaccination rates that have been on the decline, measles is back and, according to a model from Stanford University researchers, the highly infectious disease that was all but eradicated in the US is here to stay even if the recent trend of vaccine hesitancy is halted.
If it is not, things will get really bad.
According to the model, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a 10-percent decrease in vaccination rates would lead to more than 10 million measles cases and thousands of deaths over the next 25 years.
That drop in vaccination rates does not seem far-fetched. Americans, especially conservatives, have become skeptical of vaccines in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and an aggressive anti-vax campaign.
In fact, things could get even worse.
The researchers estimate that, if vaccination rates were cut in half, the country would see more than 50 million new cases of measles that result in 10 million hospitalizations and nearly 160,000 deaths.
That, too, is not out of the question.
Nathan Lo, the senior author of the study and an assistant professor of infectious diseases, noted that the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) is especially controversial because, among vaccine skeptics, it has been linked to an increase in autism even though no reputable study has ever shown such a connection.
And once the vaccination rates drop, it is only a matter of time until measles becomes endemic again.
“Travelers importing a disease are like matches, and US under-vaccination is the tinder,” stated Mathew Kiang, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of epidemiology and population health. “With measles, you’re throwing a lot of matches in, and eventually something is going to happen.”
The researchers noted that this will not happen immediately. However, once it does, public health officials won’t just be able to throw a switch and eradicate the disease again. Instead, millions of Americans will be at risk, especially babies that are too young to be vaccinated and people who are immunocompromised.
Lo said one conceivable scenario is that vaccination rates continue to drop, which leads to more frequent, larger, and deadlier measles outbreaks, which then could cause skeptics to embrace the MMR vaccine again.
However, if that were to happen, it would take a lot of hard work to get back to where we are right now, which is a place worse than where the country was a decade ago.
“It’s worth emphasizing that there really shouldn’t be any cases at this point, because these diseases are preventable,” said Kiang. “Anything above zero is tragic. When you’re talking about potentially thousands or millions, that’s unfathomable.”
