![]() Meanwhile, the anti-vaccine movement continues to gain purchase. In 2021, twenty-five million children missed at least one dose of routine immunizations. In 2020, when dozens of countries experienced a months-long pause in polio-vaccination efforts, at least eleven hundred children were paralyzed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has experienced its largest decline in childhood vaccinations in three decades. Military conflicts, migration patterns, and humanitarian crises have all contributed to polio’s spread, but fundamentally, vaccine-preventable diseases rise when vaccination rates fall. “We can’t just be reassured by high vaccination rates in the country as a whole, because subpopulations with low coverage can sustain transmission.” “I’m really concerned we’re going to see more cases,” Walter Orenstein, the associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center who previously directed the National Immunization Program, told me. In the worst case, these outbreaks could be more than a temporary setback: they could undermine years of hard-won progress that very nearly eradicated the virus globally. (Although every state requires polio vaccination to attend public schools, in some cases parents can obtain religious or personal exemptions, and many delay having their children immunized until they start kindergarten.) In Rockland County, which is home to a large Orthodox Jewish population that has been targeted by anti-vaccine activists, only sixty per cent of young children are immunized. ![]() ![]() Still, in communities with low immunization rates, the virus could cause considerable, completely avoidable damage. are vaccinated-well above the threshold for herd immunity-we won’t see anything like the horrifying twentieth-century outbreaks that paralyzed thousands of Americans each year. Because ninety-three per cent of children in the U.S. In June, after the virus was detected in London sewage samples, authorities declared a “national incident” and offered polio booster shots to all children who live in the city and are between the ages of one and nine.įor people who are vaccinated, the virus poses little risk: a complete series of polio immunization is more than ninety-nine-per-cent protective against systemic disease. In Israel, eight cases of polio in children were reported in the spring. organized a fake hepatitis-B vaccination campaign in Pakistan with the goal of finding Osama bin Laden revelations of the covert program subsequently destroyed trust in immunization, and dozens of vaccinators were killed.) In Ukraine, polio has paralyzed at least two people in the past year. The ancestral strain of polio has never been eradicated in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and, earlier this year, more than a year after Africa was declared free of it, the virus paralyzed children in Malawi and Mozambique. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the situation a public-health emergency. Romero, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told me. “I think it’s safe to assume that this case represents the very tip of the iceberg,” José R. According to public-health officials, hundreds may have been infected, and the virus is now sloshing around in New York City wastewater. Polio can be prevented, but not cured.īecause most cases of polio do not paralyze, a single case of paralysis suggests that the virus could already be widespread. He presented to a nearby hospital, where he became the first person in nearly a decade to be diagnosed with polio in the United States. A few days later, he struggled to move his legs. ![]() In June, an unvaccinated, twenty-year-old man in Rockland County, New York, developed fever, abdominal pain, and neck stiffness. It’s especially tragic, then, when we squander what opportunities we have, whether by choice, neglect, or incompetence. Some ten thousand diseases afflict humankind, and we have the power to vanquish only a handful of them.
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