The number of cases in the ongoing measles outbreak has increased to 258 across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. In response, state health departments are encouraging more individuals to receive the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.
In a Tuesday broadcast of an interview with Fox News, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated that “people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves. What we need to do is provide them with the best information and motivate them to get vaccinated. The vaccine does halt the transmission of the illness.
However, Kennedy also minimized the vaccine’s safety and inaccurately informed Sean Hannity of Fox News that measles outbreaks could partly result from individuals with waning immunity from the vaccine.
“As children, everyone got measles, and it provided … lifetime immunity against measles infection. The vaccine does not perform that function. „Das Vakzin wirkt bei manchen Menschen lebenslang, aber bei vielen lässt die Wirkung nach“, sagte Kennedy zu Hannity.
„In some years, we experience hundreds of these outbreaks. … And, you know, part of that is due to individuals not getting vaccinated, but also the vaccine’s effectiveness diminishes over time. He stated, “The vaccine wanes at a rate of 4.5% each year.”
However, Dr. Paul Offit, who directs the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, argues that if that were true, measles wouldn’t have been declared eliminated in the US in 2000.
Experts disagree to some extent on the extent of protection reduction, if any. Nonetheless, they all concur that in the majority of cases, the vaccine provides lifelong immunity to the virus.
Dr. Michael Mina, chief scientific officer of the telehealth company eMed and an expert in epidemiology, immunology, and the spread of infectious disease, stated that the current outbreak “is absolutely being driven and started by unvaccinated individuals.”
He stated that even individuals with potentially decreasing immunity will not pass on significant quantities of the virus.
While the antibody levels induced by the vaccine may diminish with time, the longer incubation period of a virus such as measles allows for more assistance from the body’s immune memory cells in combating the infection. Offit explained that this allows for vaccination-derived immunity to endure over time.
After the US declared measles eliminated, the annual average of reported cases reached approximately 179, with a significant portion linked to international travel. On average, there have been approximately eight outbreaks each year, with numbers varying from 1 to 25 annually. In most years, outbreaks have been linked to at least 60% of all reported cases. However, even the most severe outbreaks usually involve fewer than 50 cases.
Since 2000, only the fifth year has seen an outbreak resulting in over 100 cases, and only the third year has seen over 200 cases. The other years were 2014, which saw an outbreak linked to Disneyland, and 2019, when a New York outbreak lasting almost a year nearly ended the country’s elimination status.
