In Middle Tennessee, the surge of new babies highlights the heightened risks due to declining vaccination rates. The author recalls the shift in parents' attitudes toward vaccinations since the discredited 1998 Lancet study that falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism. As vaccination rates fell, parents began to avoid the risk of vaccinating, believing it unnecessary if others were vaccinating. Despite the debunking of the autism link over two decades ago, vaccination rates continue to dwindle, resulting in outbreaks of diseases like measles in communities, compounded by public health policy led by anti-vaccine advocates.
Before the internet deluded people into believing that an online search was commensurate with a medical degree, vaccination rates were high enough in this country to provide de facto herd immunity.
As long as most others were accepting the risk of vaccines, their thinking went, there was no need for all parents to do so.
The study that initially raised so many concerns was debunked more than 20 years ago. Today there is absolutely no reason to believe that the measles vaccine causes autism.
Now a measles outbreak is raging in unvaccinated communities in West Texas and New Mexico, and a longtime anti-vaccine activist oversees health policy in this country.
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