A nurse prepares a booster dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine during a mass vaccination for people over 60 years old, in Mexico City, Mexico, on Jan. 4, 2022.Luis Cortes/Reuters
Vaccines have done their job so well it’s easy to forget the world before them.
They are why seniors are the only Canadians who remember anyone with polio, which killed and paralyzed thousands of children. They’re why deaths in Ontario last year of measles and rabies, in a pair of unrelated cases, were the first such fatalities in the province in decades.
Globally, vaccinations saved more than 150 million lives over the last half century, according to research published in The Lancet.
Vaccines vie with antibiotics for being the greatest discoveries medical science has made. For most of human history, people died gruesome deaths from diseases that can be prevented now with a simple jab.
But success has made people less wary.
As she prepares to retire, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, is raising the alarm about falling vaccination rates for measles. Specifically, she was calling attention to outbreaks in Quebec and Ontario. But really she was warning about the risk of Canada losing ground in the fight against a preventable disease.
“I’m concerned that vaccination rates for measles among children are not high enough in some areas of Canada to prevent the spread of measles,” she said in a recent statement.
Canada is not alone. The WHO has warned that measles is on the march globally. The most recent figures are for 2023, which showed a 20-per-cent rise in measles cases from the previous year. More than 100,000 people died. This is 8 per cent fewer than died the previous year.
This seeming paradox – more cases, but fewer deaths – is explained by the WHO as the result of the surge in measles cases happening largely in countries with better access to medical care, leading to better health outcomes.
The lesson of this is not that measles is no big deal in a country with good health care. A family in Ontario lost a child under five to the disease just last year, showing that access to care is no guarantee.
In any event, Canada’s health-care system is struggling already with demand. Every unvaccinated measles patient that ends up unnecessarily in hospital makes it harder for others to receive treatment.
The better lesson to take from this is that doubts about vaccines have permeated most deeply into developed countries. That’s probably because these countries have done best at deploying vaccines, helping relegate the diseases they target to the history books.
But history has a way of roaring back. Consider Dr. Tam’s warnings about measles. Or look south of the border, where prominent anti-vaxxer Robert Fr. Kennedy Jr. appears headed toward confirmation as secretary of the Heath and Human Services department.
During his hearing, Mr. Kennedy countered critics by saying repeatedly he was open to seeing the science, ignoring the wealth of research debunking false claims about a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella.
The fact he has made it this far into the confirmation process shows what can happen when vaccine denialism gets normalized. In a society where expertise wasn’t scorned and science wasn’t politicized, his nomination would not have got off the ground.
But this is the world in which we live. And when the next pandemic comes – because there will inevitably be another -- vaccine development and deployment will be only part of the battle. Public buy-in will also be crucial.
Tragically, anti-vaccine views find fertile ground. In many countries the pandemic helped spur an erosion of confidence in public-health officials.
When trust is under siege, officials need to be transparent. They must be clear about how their recommendations are beneficial to the broader public health while being upfront about any possible risk to the individual.
Luckily, Canadian adults are intelligent enough to understand that nothing is an unalloyed good. Everything someone does involves a risk-benefit calculation. Getting a vaccine is no different.
The confirmation of Mr. Kennedy would embolden anti-vaxxers. But public-health officials have a compelling story to tell: vaccines save millions of lives with minimal side effects. That’s a message no one should forget.