Vaccination and Immunization

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Faith Leaders Need to Loudly Defend Routine Childhood Vaccinations

      by

      As of this writing, the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has spread to 99 people; 95 percent of those diagnosed with measles this year are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccine status, and the vast majority of those affected are under 19. The outbreak is concentrated in Gaines County, Texas, a rural area in West Texas with a disproportionately high level of religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccines — a whopping 47.95 percent of students from one of only three public school districts in the county claimed exemptions in the 2023-24 school year. The percentage of exemptions in all of Gaines County is nearly 14 percent, and that doesn’t include home-schooled children.Earlier this month, the Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson Lara Anton said that the outbreak in Gaines County was mostly among the “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, whose members don’t get regular health care and don’t attend public school. “The church isn’t the reason that they’re not vaccinated,” Anton said in a news release. “It’s all personal choice and you can do whatever you want.”“Do whatever you want” might be good advice for choosing a fun new wallpaper, but it’s terrible advice for encouraging vaccine uptake.You might assume that many religious groups are doctrinally opposed to vaccination. Why else would the majority of states allow for religious or philosophical exemptions to school vaccine mandates? But that is not accurate. The Mennonite leadership, as Anton points out, is not against vaccines — and neither are most other major religious groups. The U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches made a statement in 2021 regarding the Covid vaccine that “our confession of faith and our current and historical practice do not provide the necessary rationale for granting a religious exemption based on the theological convictions of the denomination” (italics theirs).This isn’t the first time that undervaccinated religious groups have been at the epicenter of measles outbreaks. In 1991, a Philadelphia measles outbreak that killed nine people spread in two church communities that did not believe in any medical intervention. In 2018-19, an outbreak in Brooklyn took root among undervaccinated Orthodox Jews.As Caitlin Rivers points out in a recent guest essay for Times Opinion, routine childhood vaccines are still very, very popular in the United States. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is already going back on promises he made about vaccines during his confirmation hearing. Earlier he said he wouldn’t mess with the childhood vaccination schedule, and now he’s saying “Nothing is going to be off limits.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Scientists Describe Rare Syndrome Following Covid Vaccinations

      by

      In a small study, patients with the syndrome were more likely to experience reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus and high levels of a coronavirus protein.The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study.Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood.The study was posted online Wednesday and has not yet been published in a scientific journal. “I want to emphasize that this is still a work in progress,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who led the work.“It’s not like this study determined what’s making people sick,” she said, “but it’s the first kind of glimpse at what may be going on within these people.”Independent experts noted that the findings were not conclusive on their own. Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny, they said.“One of the most important things is that we get some attention to really shine a light on this and try to understand exactly what it is,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. (Dr. Wherry has previously collaborated with Dr. Iwasaki’s team, but did not participate in this work.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Kennedy’s Anti-Vaccine Views Don’t Represent America

      by

      There is very little that Americans can agree on these days. Half of people report that religion is very important to them, while more than a quarter say it’s not. Just under half of parents are satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, while the other half are not. Even sports, often considered America’s pastime, draw the interest of only a little over one third of Americans.But one thing nearly everyone agrees on? Vaccines are good.This simple fact has been overshadowed by fears about what will happen to vaccine policy under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy has a long history of vaccine skepticism, and critics fear his leadership could lead to interference with vaccine programs or even withdrawal of vaccines from the market. Such moves are already roiling some state health programs. In Louisiana, the Health Department will “no longer promote mass vaccination,” instead leaving vaccine education to medical providers.What has been overlooked in discussions about Mr. Kennedy’s future agenda is one key fact: Vaccines remain enormously popular. Given this broad support, politicians should think twice about targeting something so widely valued.Recent reports in the news media and medical journals highlight a decline in the proportion of kindergartners who have received the measles, mumps, rubella shot. In the last five years, national coverage has fallen to 93 percent, from 95 percent, and in some states like Idaho, it is as low as 80 percent. But while these numbers fall short of the national goal of 95 percent required to maintain herd immunity for measles, they remain a resounding show of confidence.This confidence extends not just to the M.M.R. vaccine. Some 92 percent of American children received the polio vaccine by age 2, and more than 90 percent were vaccinated against hepatitis B. And it’s not just because of school requirements. Nearly nine in 10 Americans — including 86 percent of Republicans — say the benefits of childhood vaccines outweigh the risks.Unlike children, who typically have regular checkups and managed vaccination schedules through their pediatricians, many adults don’t have a doctor checking in with them on immunization. Yet nearly eight in 10 adults have still received at least one Covid-19 vaccination. Four in 10 get the annual flu vaccine, which prevents severe illness but not infection. That number rises to 70 percent among older adults, the population most at risk. While there is room for improvement, these numbers are solid indicators that vaccines are in good standing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Every 100 Years America Produces a Robert Kennedy Jr.

      by

      The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called “dead food.” His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, “Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,” in a book called “Strength From Eating.”“Strength From Eating” features a photograph of the muscleman flexing his veiny, highly articulated arm right before the preface, with the phrase “yours for health,” written in Macfadden’s distinctive cursive underneath the photo. Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion — he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his own scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was key to spreading his gospel.A fit body like his own, his thinking went, was a moral body. A person could ward off all manner of deadly diseases without medical intervention as long as they took care of their individual health. According to a biography of Mr. Macfadden called “Mr. America” by Mark Adams, “Vaccination, or as Mr. Macfadden saw it, the unnecessary pumping of dead germs into the bloodstream, was lunacy.”Mr. Macfadden’s ideas are served to millions of people every day via social media health influencers in the year 2025, but he is not of the internet era. He was born in 1868, and he was arguably the most prominent proponent of alternative health practices from around 1900 until after World War II. He found common ground with politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy described battling the ill health of our nation’s children in much the same way Mr. Macfadden did, as a moral crusade: “It is a spiritual issue and it is a moral issue. We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world, and we’re writing off an entire generation of kids.”For a long time, I thought the MAHA movement was simply anti-institutional. But that explanation falls apart upon examination, because the medical establishment has long argued for clean air, clean water and better access to healthy food. I have never met a doctor who doesn’t stress regular exercise. Many people have pointed out that Michelle Obama was concerned about childhood obesity just as Mr. Kennedy is and used her platform to encourage Americans to eat healthily and move their bodies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Review: In ‘Eureka Day,’ Holding Space for Those You Hate

      by

      A hilarious new Broadway production asks: Can the superwoke vaxxers and anti-vaxxers at an elite private school learn to get along?Just in time, laughter is making a big comeback on Broadway. Better yet, it comes in several varieties.For catty yowling, check out Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, wringing necks in “Death Becomes Her.” For helpless giggles, there’s Cole Escola as that cabaret legend Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” And if you enjoy the hysteria of family fireworks, “Cult of Love” should leave you gasping.But the funniest character now on Broadway isn’t even a human being — or not exactly. Getting the biggest belly laughs in Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” which opened on Monday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a yellow thumbs-up emoji.The emoji appears — chipper then aggravating then weirdly insidious — in a livestream meeting of parents and executive board members at Eureka Day, an upscale private school in Berkeley, Calif. As Don, the principal, tries to handle a looming crisis, using every banality at his new-age disposal, the conversation in the chat veers correspondingly out of control. His attempt to “unpack” issues calmly has instead disgorged a torrent of personal attacks, vulgar language and childish invective. By the end of the scene, the third of the play’s quick seven, the thumb seems like a different finger entirely.Spector’s hilarious poison-pen satire of educational wokeism has led us to that point with great care. A Manhattan Theater Club production, directed bracingly by Anna D. Shapiro, it begins, in 2018, with a kind of dramaturgical canapé to whet our appetites for the main dish. As the lights come up on the school’s bright library, prominently featuring a social justice collection, Don (Bill Irwin) is leading the board in a discussion about a proposed addition to the drop-down menu on the prospective parent application. Should it include “transracial adoptee” as an option among the many other ethnic identities offered?The point is argued with elaborate courtesy bordering on incomprehensibility. Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz) says “the term itself is not offensive,” but Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) thinks it might be offensive “when you contextualize it in that way.” Eli (Thomas Middleditch) feels that failing to add the term would amount to a kind of erasure, given that “our Core Operating Principle here is that everyone should Feel Seen by this community.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health Secretary Pick, Is Set to Meet with Lawmakers

      by

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for health secretary, is set on Monday to begin a series of meetings with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill to make his case for a spot in Mr. Trump’s cabinet.Mr. Kennedy will almost certainly be questioned about his longtime anti-vaccine advocacy. He has said that he does not want to take away access to vaccines, but has repeatedly questioned their safety, trying to link them to a rise in autism in children — a debunked theory.On Friday, The New York Times also reported that a lawyer helping Mr. Kennedy vet appointees for the incoming Trump administration had petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and a survivor of polio, could be a key vote in Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation bid. In a statement Friday that did not name Mr. Kennedy, Mr. McConnell suggested that the petition could jeopardize his confirmation.“Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts,” Mr. McConnell said.Once nominated by a president, candidates for top-level positions in an administration must be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans will control the chamber, but their 53-47 majority means they can lose only a few votes and still confirm Mr. Trump’s picks.Mr. Kennedy is set to meet with Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a more moderate Republican, and some physicians in the party’s conference, including Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas.Mr. Kennedy, who ran for president as a Democrat and independent before dropping out of the race and endorsing Mr. Trump, will probably also be asked about views on abortion access.Former Vice President Mike Pence has called on Republican senators to reject Mr. Kennedy, citing his record of support for abortion rights.“On behalf of tens of millions of pro-life Americans, I respectfully urge Senate Republicans to reject this nomination and give the American people a leader who will respect the sanctity of life as secretary of Health and Human Services,” Mr. Pence said in a statement. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Plans Jan. 6 Pardons and Deportations as First Acts in Office

      by

      President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a new interview that he will use the opening hours of his presidency to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, begin deportations of undocumented immigrants and increase oil production.He also said during the interview, which Time magazine published on Thursday, that he might supporting getting rid of some childhood vaccines if data shows links to autism. He declined to answer a question about whether he had talked with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since the November election but said Ukraine should not have been allowed to fire U.S.-made missiles into Russia.Speaking of pardons in Jan. 6 cases, he said: “We’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.” He said the pardons would go to “nonviolent” people who were at the Capitol, which was overrun by Trump supporters after he lost the 2020 election. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely,” he said.The president-elect’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview conducted on Nov. 25 as part of the magazine’s choice of Mr. Trump to be its person of the year. In the interview, which the magazine said lasted more than an hour, the president-elect bragged that he had run a “flawless” campaign and that Democrats were out of touch with Americans.He also said he planed a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington,” though he did not explain what that meant. And he said that he might reverse President Biden’s expansion of Title IX protections, which includes prohibitions against harassment of transgender students.Americans “don’t want to see, you know, men playing in women’s sports. They don’t,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t want to see all of this transgender, which is, it’s just taken over.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Shoot Me Up With Everything’

      by

      For a reporter who covers infectious diseases, vaccines are an indispensable news gathering tool.Vaccines are an indispensable news gathering tool. They permit reporters to travel to areas where fatal or debilitating diseases are prevalent; exactly the places that warrant coverage by The New York Times.That’s why the Museum at The Times displays a carton that once contained the vaccine Ixiaro. It prevents Japanese encephalitis, which is related to yellow fever, dengue and West Nile virus. Mosquitoes spread the disease. It is considered endemic in much of Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region.“The symptoms can be anything from a mild fever to, in rare cases, seizures and death,” Donald G. McNeil Jr. wrote in an email last week. “There’s no treatment. The vaccine isn’t recommended for most travelers to Asia, but if you go to rural areas and sleep in rooms with no A.C. or window screens — as I sometimes did — it’s protection.” He donated the Ixiaro carton the museum.Mr. McNeil is the author of “The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons From 25 Years of Covering Pandemics” and is a frequent contributor to the website Medium. He worked for The Times from 1976 to 2021, covering many infectious diseases, most recently Covid-19.Many of his Times assignments took him to tropical areas. In 2014, aware that new vaccines had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, he went to the New York Center for Travel and Tropical Medicine.“Shoot me up with everything,” Mr. McNeil said.Five jabs followed: Ixiaro; RabAvert, for rabies; Typhim Vi, for typhoid; a booster shot of a vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough; and probably an inactivated polio vaccine. (The clinic didn’t enter the fifth injection on Mr. McNeil’s yellow vaccine record card.)“I don’t remember any bad side effects,” Mr. McNeil wrote. “The worst side effect I’ve ever had from a shot was from my second shingles shot — and all it did was make me feel sort of nauseous and flu-ish and I went to bed without supper. I’ve been very lucky that way.”“The rabies shot was one of those ‘it wouldn’t hurt to have it’ decisions. I’m not a dog cuddler, and I definitely don’t pet strays. But they’re often hanging around in poor countries, and I did have to get up close to village dogs in rural Chad for a piece on how Guinea worm, a human parasite, was establishing a reservoir in dogs. And in some of the places I’ve slept, it wasn’t unthinkable that I might be bitten by a rat or a bat.” More