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As a pediatrician-scientist who develops new vaccines for neglected diseases, I have spent most of my career in the Boston-Washington, DC corridor.
While I was working in the Northeast, I had heard about the anti-vaccine movement. As a vaccine scientist and father of four children, including a daughter diagnosed with autism and intellectual disabilities, I followed the emergence of a doubt about safety. vaccines in the general public. In the end, in the scientific community, all debate ended when a very large body of scientific evidence showed that there was no association between vaccines and autism.
But then, in 2011, I moved to Texas Medical Center in Houston. I soon learned that unlike the Northeast, where the anti-vaccine movement seems so far limited to small groups, the anti-vaccine movement in Texas is aggressive, well organized and politically engaged.
Today, at least 57,000 Texas schoolchildren have been exempted from vaccines for non-medical reasons, 20 times more than in 2003. I say "at least" because there is no data available out of more than 300,000 children attending school.
I then started asking questions about other parts of the United States. In collaboration with colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, we conducted an in-depth study of preschool children receiving immunization exemption in the country. Currently, 18 states allow non-medical vaccine exemptions for reasons of "conscientious objector" or "philosophical / personal belief". We were able to obtain information on 14 of these states.
A clear picture emerged: Vaccine exemptions are on the rise in 12 of the states we examined. Indeed, anti-vaccine activities appear to be more of a Western phenomenon, especially in the Pacific Northwest (Idaho, Oregon and Washington) and in the American Southwest (Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah).
What is happening exactly in the West, where many parents avoid vaccines and remove their children from vaccination programs? The researchers are still in the early stages of understanding the reasons for the anti-vaccine movement. Two of these states, Oklahoma and Texas, host well-organized political action committees that lobby their legislatures and even raise campaign funds to allow candidates to approve anti-vaccine positions. These committees appeal to parents' fears of unjustified government interference.
In addition, some studies suggest that vaccine refusal is linked to wealth, and that this wealth may provide better access to the Internet. There are now hundreds of anti-vaccine websites on the internet, many of which still claim that vaccines are the cause of autism or that autism is a form of "vaccine injury", which it is not the case.
Of course, scientists have proven the safety of vaccines. As the father of an autistic girl, I recently wrote "Vaccines did not cause Rachel's autism". My book explains in detail how and why vaccines can not cause autism based on the scientific literature, as well as the challenges that my wife Ann and I face every day as parents and guardians of Rachel, now an adult living with a significant intellectual disability.
However, my last concern is the counties of the Western United States, where a high percentage of children are excluded from vaccination programs. I think these are the areas most exposed to terrible outbreaks of measles or pertussis in the years to come. Last year, Europe was inundated with measles, including dozens of deaths, due to the sharp drop in immunization coverage. I fear that the United States will suffer the same fate.
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