You don't want to throw a measles party

Five years after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, we seem to have a lot more contagious disease, not less. “It’s kind of a challenge working on measles,” Dr. Natasha Crowcroft told Salon in a video interview from Geneva, where she works as senior technical adviser at the World Health Organization. So that can take some time because — well, again, it goes back to where we don’t have any measles around and everyone’s vaccinated and everyone’s forgotten about it.” So the child gets measles, gets red spots, recovers … and after seven years or perhaps a decade of loving and caring for and living with that child, they begin to lose their faculties and, other than a small percentage of cases in which spontaneous remission occurs, the vast majority die in a particularly cruel way. As the authors of that study conclude, “SSPE cases in California occurred at a high rate among unvaccinated children, particularly those infected during infancy … SSPE demonstrates the high human cost of 'natural' measles immunity.” There’s also an adult-onset form of the disease that is again usually fatal, although more spontaneous remission seems to occur, especially if the adult was unusually young when they contracted measles. Mind you, there’s another possible reason for lowered child death rates among vaccinated children, and that’s if the measles vaccine gives your child some kind of protection that goes beyond its goal of preventing measles infection.