I get emails from Medpage Today and there was an interesting article regarding RFK Jr, and the measles vaccine. RFK, Jr, often has stated that the measles vaccine kills people every year and it's protection wanes. Dr. Offit, of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, responds:
Offit:
RFK, JR. claims that a healthy person can't get measles. right..... Dr. Offit responds:
As we watch the cruelty increase with the treatment of immigrants (as in shipping them to South Sudan or Alligator Alcatraz (though I believe it is a concentration type camp), the ceding of power from SCOTUS and Congress, this cartoon this week is so accurate:
Some of our elected leaders are not too bright:
Offit:
People aren't going to be making a good choice for themselves if they hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. say, falsely, that measles vaccine causes deaths. It doesn't cause deaths, but it is a live attenuated or weakened virus, and so here's what it can cause.
It can cause, about 14 days or so after inoculation, a lowering of the platelet cells that circulate in your body that help the blood to clot. You can get this sort of showering of what looks like broken blood vessels that is very short-lived and has no sequelae, and that happens about one in 35,000 people that get vaccinated. The vaccine can also cause a low-grade fever and a mild measles rash that lasts for a few days, but that's it.
RFK Jr. claims the vaccine wanes every year. Offit responds:Measles is a long incubation period disease. That means from the time when you're first exposed to the time that you develop symptoms is a fairly long period of time, 10 days, 14 days, sometimes as long as 21 days. So all you need to protect yourself against measles is memory cells, memory cells that can make antibodies, but you don't have to have antibodies in your circulation. You don't, because antibodies in your circulation are relatively short-lived, but memory cells are long-lived, typically a lifetime, and that's enough to protect you against measles.
Now, the reason you know that memory doesn't fade is we eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000 -- gone. If memory faded, that wouldn't have been possible. So he's wrong. Measles immunity doesn't fade.
RFK, JR. claims that a healthy person can't get measles. right..... Dr. Offit responds:
Again, the lowering of the death rate in this country owed almost solely to the development of antibiotics in the 1940s, had nothing to do with nutrition, had nothing to do with sanitation. Measles virus can certainly kill and typically does kill children who are well nourished.
I am a veteran of the 1991 Philadelphia measles epidemic where there were 1,400 cases and nine deaths over a period of 3 months. Every one of those deaths was in healthy children who were well nourished. The 6-year-old girl in West Texas who recently died of measles was well nourished, as the doctor who took care of her said.
Another point about measles; say you do not vaccinate your daughter and she eventually becomes pregnant. Exposure to measles in the first trimester exposes that fetal to be blind, or deaf, or have facial asymmetry and more. I am old enough that I knew people who had those things because their mother was exposed to measles in the first trimester. The facial asymmetry was the most heart breaking because she often had to deal with taunts and stares as it was severe enough that her eyes looked in different directions.As we watch the cruelty increase with the treatment of immigrants (as in shipping them to South Sudan or Alligator Alcatraz (though I believe it is a concentration type camp), the ceding of power from SCOTUS and Congress, this cartoon this week is so accurate:
Some of our elected leaders are not too bright:
They really need to learn history.
