How Many Must Die?

A second child, an eight-year-old girl, has died from the measles. She’d been hospitalized for several days but ultimately died from measles-based pneumonia. She was not vaccinated. Neither the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the Texas State Department of State Health Services include the death in their measles reports issued Friday. However, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attended the girl’s funeral in Texas on Sunday.

Long a skeptic of vaccines, Kennedy is now admitting that the MMR vaccine is “the best way to prevent the spread of measles.” His message could be too little too late after he earlier encouraged administering cod liver oil and vitamin A supplements, treatments which caused a large number of children to be hospitalized for kidney disease.

Misinformation about how to prevent and treat measles is hindering a robust public health response, including claims about vitamin A supplements that have been pushed by Kennedy and holistic medicine supporters despite doctors’ warnings that it should be given under a physician’s orders and that too much can be dangerous. While the CDC has been on the ground in Texas since March, they have pulled back their presence as federal layoffs reduced the number of people available for the response.

Measles is a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours. Up to 9 out of 10 people who are susceptible will get the virus if exposed, according to the CDC. The first shot is recommended for children ages 12 to 15 months, and the second for ages 4 to 6 years. This is not new information. This is not radical information. Measles was almost wiped out in the US. But not everyone likes playing by the rules.

Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s former vaccine chief, said responsibility for the death rests with Kennedy and his staff. Marks was forced out of the FDA after disagreements with Kennedy over vaccine safety. “This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “These kids should get vaccinated — that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”

Sadly enough, forcing children to be vaccinated runs into a First Amendment problem. Most of those who are unvaccinated are part of a group of Mennonites who don’t believe in vaccinating themselves nor their children. Because this is part of their religious belief, the government can’t force them to violate their religion, even if it helps save lives.

With several states facing outbreaks of the vaccine-preventable disease — and declining childhood vaccination rates nationwide — some worry that measles may cost the U.S. its status as having eliminated the disease. What we’re not seeing is mass concern over the number of children’s lives that might be lost.

The outbreak – now spanning Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and possibly Kansas – reached at least 569 cases Friday, according to data obtained from state health departments. While hospitals are well-equipped to do everything possible without the vaccination, it is a given that more children will die. Had they been vaccinated, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

There has been considerable debate over the past several years regarding the relationship between parents’ religious beliefs and various forms of child abuse. Generally speaking, the studies find that religious influence can help in the social growth of children and, in some cases, reduce childhood acts such as vagrancy and petty theft. Yet, nowhere in recent medical literature could we find anyone willing to correlate the presence of disease with religious belief as a form of abuse. Such a study needs to be happening now.

In previous instances, the courts have ruled that children can be removed from a home if the parents’ actions related to their religious beliefs prove to be abusive. The question we now have to ask is whether putting a child at risk of a known deadly disease is abuse. Short of an authoritative answer, the measles epidemic will continue to grow.

There’s no legitimate reason for more children to die from a disease that is 97% preventable. That the US is allowing this to happen out of ‘respect’ for religion is unforgivable.