LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Medical professionals are facing some hard realities as we turn the page from 2024 and look forward to 2025. Data shows that fewer and fewer kids are receiving vaccinations recommended by the CDC year after year, and some doctors think they may be, in part, to blame.
“We develop relationships with the families. We’d like to think that we are the primary resource of information for the families and the internet has kind of replaced that to a degree,” said Dr. Patrick Hynes, a pediatrician with Norton Children’s.
Dr. Hynes sat down with me in a patient room at the Norton Children’s Office in Prospect back in October. He brought pages of statistics that help outline this vaccination problem.
“We’ve been at a very comfortable rate for a long time,” he started. Now, that’s changed.
“The rates have dropped to 93% which doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but nationwide if you’re looking at a quarter million kids who haven’t had their measles vaccines,” he said. Measles is just one example of a disease that had seen a resurgence due to these falling vaccination rates. Measles is a respiratory disease that affects your lungs and can spread a rash over your body.
“As many as 31 states now are below the threshold that you need for herd immunity from measles. Which gives measles an opportunity to re-present itself within a community.”
The stats bear this out.
Before a widespread measles vaccination campaign started in 1963 worldwide measles epidemics would happen every 2-3 years and kill an estimated 2.6 million people annually according to the World Health Organization.
That vaccination campaign led the CDC to declare Measles “Eliminated” from the United States back in 2000 which led to a 14-year period where cases of measles in adults and kids stayed around or well below 200 cases annually.
By 2014 those numbers started to fluctuate, some years with the same low numbers of cases and others where we saw a sharp rise in cases.
Outside the US, Measles has continued to infect and kill people year in and year out. In 2022 the World Health Organization reported 136,000 deaths from measles, most of them children.
Dr. Hynes says when you start to see vaccination rates for diseases like measles fall, eventually you will fall under the threshold for herd immunity. The World Health Organization defines that as a state of “indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”
“That’s the problem with herd immunity. Once the vaccination rates drop, things we thought we had under control then become more of a problem from a public health concern,” said Dr. Hynes.
So the question becomes how do we stem the tide of these diseases and boost our community back to a “herd immunity threshold?” Dr. Hynes says that’s easier said than done because in his opinion, trust in medical professionals is seeing a decline right along with those vaccination rates.
“Science is pretty straightforward. Science is fact-based. Science is reproducible. During the pandemic everyone realized that science is kind of messy,” said Dr. Hynes.
“We need to sit down and we need to talk to the families. We need to explain to them, what are the things you are concerned about, where did you get that information, what is it that worries you most about it, and sit down and explain where accurate sources of information can be from.”
He says in his own experience having a conversation with someone who is vaccine hesitant goes a long way towards easing those concerns. Those conversations can be a step towards regaining the sense of trust that may have been lost in the messy science of the pandemic.
“All they’re trying to do is filter through the misinformation to do the best thing for their child. And that should be our job to help them through that path,” said Dr. Hynes.