One of the things lost in the furor over vaccines in the past few years is that people still contract and die from some of the disease vaccines prevent. Eight people have died in California stemming from a whooping cough epidemic that has affected 3,000 people this year.
Whooping cough cycles through the population regularly -- partly because the vaccine is only about 80 percent effective, but also because people rarely get booster shots, and it takes awhile for infants to develop immunity. There's no hint that this particular outbreak has anything to do with parents refusing to get vaccines, but outbreaks of disease like measles and mumps have become more common as objections to vaccinations have risen. In the Frontline episode on vaccinations, many of the mothers -- and it was mostly mothers -- who objected to vaccinating their kids said simply that we no longer needed vaccines: most of these diseases had disappeared from America and, anyway, we have modern medicine if children do get sick. But medicine can't always save a child who's choking to death.
On the show, the mothers also talked about vaccines as a personal choice and familial responsibility and didn't feel they had a communal obligation to get their kids vaccinated. But that's actually what public-health vaccine policies address; there is a public-health obligation to get vaccinated. When a particular shot is only 80 percent effective, it's much less effective unless other people are immunized, too. This, in microcosm, illustrates the problem with the health-care debate in this country: What's best for all of us -- a health-insurance system in which everyone participates whether they need to use medical services or not -- is likely to cost someone something. But citizens of other countries understand the broad ways they benefit because society benefits as a whole. We're still too obsessed with our individual determinations to get that.
-- Monica Potts
