Nixing School Vaccination Requirements May Welcome Back These Infectious Diseases

Lately I feel like I’m living in an alternate universe that is the polar opposite of the British dystopian anthology Black Mirror, in which characters obsess over increasingly intrusive technologies. Instead, here in the US, leaders appallingly ignorant of basic biology are attacking one of the greatest and most brilliant technologies ever invented – the vaccine.

A vaccine is a bit of a pathogen, harmless, that evokes a protective immune response.

Leaders Who Missed Bio 101
On September 3, Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo addressed an exuberant crowd about eliminating public school vaccine mandates:

“All of them. All of them. Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”

The good doctor vowed to work with the government to rid the people of the “immoral” and “wrong” vaccines foisted upon their innocent children.

Many in the audience applauded.

“Morality” and “right or wrong” are value judgments that have no place in medical decision-making. Where did this man get his MD? Perhaps he should take the pop quiz for RFK Jr I posted a few weeks ago.

Schoolkids are going to get sick, bring the bugs home and into the community, where older folks and those who aren’t healthy are at heightened risk of contracting severe forms of the illnesses, as well as suffer complications.

Vaccines Have Saved Millions of Lives
Those of us of a certain age can vividly remember having the “diseases of childhood” – measles, mumps, rubella (once called German measles), and chickenpox. I had them all.

My parents lived in fear of polio shortly before I was born, but I was an early recipient of the vaccine. And we’re all familiar with COVID and flu, perhaps hepatitis.

As a kid of course I hated the shots – but even when I was 6 years old, I understood WHY I needed them: to keep me from getting sick. I remember my third grade classroom emptying out as all of us came down with the flu, chickenpox, measles or mumps.

I often wondered about the smallpox vaccine I got, more a long scratch than an injection. It wiped out the once deadly disease. The last case of smallpox was in a 3-year-old boy in Somalia in 1977. Vaccination had ceased five years earlier, no longer needed.

My obsession with biology, particularly infectious diseases, grew. Like many other kids in the 1960s, I devoured Paul de Kruif’s classic Microbe Hunters. Perhaps RFK Jr and Dr. Joseph Ladapo should pick up a copy of the updated version.

Thirteen Infectious Diseases That Could Return if Vaccines Lapse

Here’s a list of the diseases that could come back because they still exist.

These conditions might not cause more than the sniffles and a scratchy throat for otherwise healthy children and young adults, but for the immunocompromised or otherwise ill or injured, they could be a considerable threat. High-risk groups for infectious diseases include infants, people with underlying conditions, and older adults.

We all know about COVID and influenza, numbers 1 and 2, but here are the others, in alphabetical order.

3. Chickenpox My three daughters were born before and after availability of chickenpox vaccine – only the eldest had the abundant, itchy, eventually crusty spots. And I still have a few scars from when I was a kid and scratched too much. Like many infectious diseases, it’s worse in adults, possibly leading to pneumonia and encephalitis.

4. Hepatitis B The hepatitis B virus is highly transmissible and can cause acute illness and leave a person with chronic liver disease. The virus, in body fluids, typically passes through shared needles or having sex, and infects fetuses. It is far more infectious than HIV. Survivors face risk of liver cancer.

5. Haemophilus influenzae type B These bacteria cause pneumonia, brain or spinal cord inflammation (meningitis), and can infect the blood, bone, or joints. It spreads from infected but asymptomatic individuals in coughs and sneezes, which is why vaccination is important – to protect others. Before the vaccine became available in 1985, in the US about 20,000 kids under 5 got it each year; up to 6% of them died.

6. Measles An extremely contagious skin rash and respiratory infection, measles can also cause encephalitis and can kill. Transmission rate is 90% among the unvaccinated. The virus remains in the environment up to two hours.

7. Meningococcal disease A sudden fever, headache, and characteristic stiff neck can progress to meningitis, as the brain and spinal cord swell. It is rare but the bacteria spread readily through nose and throat secretions. Fatality rate approaches 15 percent, even with antibiotics.

8. Mumps I vividly recall the onset of the mumps. I was in fourth grade, and our family was driving over the bridge that connects Brooklyn to Rockaway. I bit into a potato chip, and felt excruciating, sudden pain in the backs of my lower jaws. Fever and muscle aches followed for a week. Mumps spreads in coughs and sneezes; I’d obviously contracted mumps from dripping classmates. The vaccine wears off in some people, and so outbreaks can happen, such as in college dorms. Mumps also causes meningitis, deafness, and male infertility.

My sister had the good sense to have been born a few years later than me, when the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine became available that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella viruses.

9. Pertussis (whooping cough) This is an easily-transmissible, severe cough with a characteristic whooping sound that impairs breathing, raising risk of pneumonia, seizures, and death. It is bacterial.

10. Pneumococcal disease This bacterial disease affects the blood, ears, lungs (pneumonia), and the brain and spinal cord (meningitis), passed in saliva and mucus. It can be life-threatening, especially to those over 65.

11. Polio Some of us born in the 1950s can remember friends and family who had the paralyzing condition. I wrote about the relief my parents felt when the vaccine became available,
here.

Polio isn’t gone, for it comes back when and where vaccination lapses, such as in religious communities that shun vaccines. The virus lives in human intestines, exiting easily with feces, but also into the environment, such as in water supplies. I got a shot; my younger sister got the oral version, a treat delivered in a pink sugar cube.

Polio caused minor respiratory symptoms in many infected people, but also led to paralysis (hence the need for iron lungs), brain infection, and death.

12. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infects the nose, throat, and lungs. It usually produces only a mild cold, but can be severe or deadly in high-risk groups (infants, people with underlying conditions, older adults)

13. Tetanus Once called lockjaw, tetanus impairs breathing and causes muscle spasms, paralysis, and death. Bacteria from soil, dust, and manure enter the body through a skin break. It is fatal in up to 20% of cases; people over 60 and those with diabetes are at higher risk of severe infection.

Vaccines may be combined, such as the MMR and DTaP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis). Diphtheria is especially awful. I fear it could return should too many families turn down the DTaP.

Will Diphtheria Return?

Diphtheria was a most terrible disease. I’d heard of it, read about it in Microbe Hunters, but never knew of anyone who’d had it because of the vaccine, invented in 1923.

I learned more about it from the excellent BBC television series Poldark, which takes place in Cornwall, UK, in the late eighteenth century. Main characters Ross and Gemelza Poldark lose a baby daughter, Julia, to what was then aptly termed putrid throat. The story showed many people developing and then spreading the excruciating condition, their throats closing up with white secretions.

Diphtheria is a bacterial infection of the mucous membranes of the nose and throat that can also affect the heart, kidneys and nervous system. The vaccine vanquished it in many nations, including the US, but outbreaks still occur elsewhere.

I fear that diphtheria can return to the US, if people start to skip vaccines, because a skin form persists. Might the shared pathogen, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, mutate, extending its turf to the easy-to-infect mucous membranes?

Other Vaccines

The vaccines on my list aren’t the only ones.

Travel to Africa requires immunization against malaria (a protozoan parasite); the bacteria behind typhoid; and the viruses that cause yellow fever, rabies, and hepatitis A – especially if gorillas are on the itinerary, for the viruses that cause a human cold can kill them.

People aged 9 through 45 can receive a vaccine, Gardisil, that protects against several pathogenic forms of human papilloma virus (HPV). This is important because HPV infection can raise risk of certain cancers.

Older people routinely receive vaccines against a form of pneumonia caused by strep bacteria, and against shingles, which is viral.

CODA

Removing vaccine mandates in schools will open up niches for all manner of pathogens to extend their ranges. If it happens in Florida, I fear for the state of public health there a decade from now. Canadians won’t be the only ones refusing to visit. Much of the large older population will be afraid to be around their grandkids.

With clueless leaders and gullible, uneducated people believing their every word, I fear that we are laying out a welcome mat for the return of the infectious diseases that once harmed and killed many.

I wish there was a vaccine to protect against such ignorance.