There is nothing more fitting than the fact that the old, eradicated disease measles made its comeback at “the happiest place on Earth” — Disneyland.
The irony of this event should have been reason itself for parents all across Wisconsin and the country to get their kids vaccinated, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
There are a set of vaccinations all kids are required to get before entering kindergarten in Wisconsin, but exceptions can be made based on personal and religious beliefs. In recent years, the number of children opting out of vaccinations using these exceptions has been on the rise.
Empirical data collected by the Center for Disease Control, shows that 5 percent of 2015’s Wisconsin kindergarten population, or 3,368 kids, were exempt from the required immunizations. Of these children, 3,319 (98 percent) were exempt due to personal convictions. The other 2 percent were issued because of religious beliefs and medical purposes.
This is not simply an issue that affects K-12 schooling; it’s important to University of Wisconsin as well. UW must accept and enroll 3,600 Wisconsinites into its university, so in the future some of the 3,319 un-vaccinated kindergartners could conceivably be walking up Bascom.
The people challenging the veritability of vaccines tend to be from a higher socioeconomic background and highly educated. In California, the highest incidence of opting out of vaccinations occurred in the wealthy school districts, with some schools having a inoculation rate as low as South Sudan.
Since the wealthy and educated are those more likely to forgo vaccination, there is a higher likelihood that people attending UW have not been vaccinated since 79 percent of us are not first generation college students, according to a 2008 study.
Diseases that have vaccines have appeared at UW before. Mumps was reported on campus in January, and a patient with measles was at a UW hospital in 2014.
Both of these cases were pretty difficult to spread around campus. The mumps incident occurred over winter break and the patient with measles did not attend UW. But having a native population increasingly forgoing immunizations is troubling. Diseases like measles are extremely contagious, infecting up to 90 percent of not immunized people, who come into contact with an infected person.
The anti-vaccine movement hinges upon misinformation disseminating from a prolific source — former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy. She believes vaccinations cause autism, a claim with no factual basis.
Others believe vaccines are a lie created by big pharmacy companies to exploit the masses for profit. Despite this claim, historical trends indicate the opposite. Even though pharmaceutical companies are generating a lot of money from selling these vaccines, profit margins remain unknown to the public.
There are a lot of factors to enter the market for vaccinations, including research and development and high production costs, indicating the profit margins on vaccinations are low.
Since the alleged downsides to vaccinations are nonexistent, legislation requiring all people to get vaccinated, which was introduced in the state Senate should be passed.
If less than 92 percent of the population has a vaccine for essentially eradicated diseases, there’s an increased chance these diseases can make a comeback. Wisconsin vaccinations rates are trending towards that figure.
It’s time to do the responsible thing and enact legislation requiring all children to get vaccinated. Because if one kid doesn’t get vaccinated, it doesn’t just affect the individual, it affects everybody.
Aaron Reilly ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in comparative literature and Russian.
