The Anti-Vaccine Movement In Appalachia

According to the Centers For Disease Control, there have been 1044 individual cases of measles confirmed in 28 states between January 1, 2019, and April 19, 2019.  They say that this is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000. far exceeding the 667 cases reported during all of 2014. The outbreak has covered nearly the entire continent with cases reported in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.. Four of these states are in Central and Southern Appalachia, the most culturally Appalachian area within the greater Appalachian region as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission.  According to the World Health Organization, "measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases, with the potential to be extremely severe. In 2017, the most recent year for which estimates are available, it caused close to 110 000 deaths" worldwide.So the real question is this: why in 2019 is the USA which is generally considered to be the most medically advanced country in the world suffering from any measles outbreak nearly twenty years after our health organizations considered the disease to have been eradicated in our country.  There is absolute, empirical scientific proof that measles vaccine prevents and, if used universally, can totally eradicate the disease.  

There are several reasons for this outbreak but the answer is simple.  The great majority of people who have contracted measles were unvaccinated and when measles reaches a community with a significant number of unvaccinated people it can spread rapidly, infect high numbers of unvaccinated people, cost our nation and its drastically and deliberately underfunded health care system millions of dollars, and kill significant numbers of the medically fragile including the young, elderly, medically fragile, and those with problems of the immune system.  This has been proven unequivocally in Rockland County New York where at least 225 people have contracted the disease.  Public officials in both New York state and Rockland County have acted professionally and courageously in the face of this epidemic and have taken strong actions in attempting to protect their citizens.  The New York legislature took the medically necessary step of removing the religious exemption for vaccinations.  This action should become federal law since 45 other states are still allowing such religious exemptions; the number of people who are endangering the entire citizenry is increasing; and their deliberate misinformation campaign is causing the gullible, uneducated, and paranoid members of society to fall prey to their tactics. Thankfully, legislators in several of those 45 states are now considering legislation similar to the New York law in order to protect the general population and begin work to once again eradicate this disease which had essentially been eliminated in America before this ignorance based epidemic struck. Sadly, all of the states in the Central and Southern Appalachian region with the single exception of West Virginia allow religious exemptions to vaccinations.  Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina all allow such exemptions.

In the research process for this blog post I have just discovered that one of the major anti-vaccine organizations constructed their website in a design which consciously copies the design and overall appearance of the websites of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.   I am deliberately refusing to name or provide a link to that anti-vaccine organization in order to avoid assisting them in their efforts to endanger the entire human race.

Several other areas of the country have taken similar steps to those taken in New York in the face of the epidemic.  But the greatest problem in the entire epidemic has been the fact that most of the people infected have either deliberately and consciously refused to be vaccinated or, in the cases of many children, they have been denied this potentially lifesaving vaccination by parents who claim either religious exemptions to vaccinations or, in some cases, have simply expressed anti-science or anti-government beliefs to justify their refusals.  Sadly, in most of these cases, the anti-vaccine elements have been passively allowed to continue with their actions, or inaction, which has greatly increased the threat of infections in the general public, especially among the medically fragile who sometimes cannot be vaccinated.  

In Rockland County, most of the unvaccinated victims of the disease have been Orthodox Jews.  But in other areas of the country, including Central and Southern Appalachia, these unvaccinated victims have claimed nebulous opposition to the vaccine which are frequently based on completely unscientific and non-religious reasons.  These reasons are often rooted in propaganda from anti-government, anti-vaccine Right Wing Radical individuals and groups who rant and rave without one iota of empirical scientific evidence or actual law to support their rantings which greatly endangers the general public and most especially endangers the medically fragile, young, and old who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate personal medical reasons.  The likelihood is considerable that the next epidemic in this country could be for a far more virulent and life-threatening disease which would originate in one of these ill informed, uneducated, and irrational groups.  Communities ranging in size from a single incorporated community to the entire country must legislate laws to force these groups and individuals to be vaccinated.   Parents must be held responsible under existing child welfare laws for the preventable diseases which cause harm to their children due to deliberate refusals to vaccinate those children.  The voluntary refusal to vaccinate a child against such a disease is undeniably child abuse.  While I am a firm advocate of free speech, I also firmly believe that the greater good must always override any single person or small group's desire to practice some form of insanity which endangers the health and lives of others.

This is a problem which could be adequately and efficiently addressed by the US Congress in a matter of only a few days.  Federal law requiring vaccinations against all communicable and virulent diseases for which vaccines exist would save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives over the next decades.  Such law would also save billions of dollars of medical expenses which are now being unnecessarily expended to treat and cure these victims of their parents' ignorance.  The overall harm to society and the economy in general of a disease outbreak such as this is stupendous and stupendously ignorant.  As a society, we must put a stop to such deliberate harm to the larger population.