Forget Anti-Vaxxers. Bring Vaccines to Parents Who Desperately Want Them.
Some scientists now think that measles can be eradicated with an emphasis on the developing world.
In Madagascar, the measles vaccine is in high demand. An outbreak this year has killed more than 1,200 children.
Photographer: Mamyrael/AFP, via Getty Images
With all the outrage aimed at so-called anti-vaxxers for causing the current U.S. measles outbreak, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the vast majority of measles deaths worldwide happen to children whose parents desperately wanted to get them vaccinated but couldn’t. By focusing efforts on developing countries where the outbreaks are many times bigger and deadlier, some scientists think it might be possible to eradicate the virus soon, as they did 40 years ago with smallpox.
Smallpox was an easier target because the virus is less contagious, so doctors didn’t have to get nearly as big a fraction of the population vaccinated to drive it to extinction, said Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. But what we have now is better technology to track the virus around the globe and more precisely target vaccination strategies. In a recent issue of the journal Science, he and colleagues describe outbreak patterns they observed in global data from 1980 to 2017, and they discuss how to use them in an ongoing effort to eradicate the virus.