U.S. records 75 new measles cases, 9.8% increase, as outbreak grows

These two statistics aren't directly comparable because the former is "against some [i.e., any] disease" and the latter is specifically the MMR vaccine. My guess is that in many developing countries the polio vaccine is the most administered because it's extremely cheap, extremely effective, addresses a very serious disease, and isn't at all painful for the child.

Another important childhood vaccine that would be covered in the 85% global statistic is the different variants of DTP.

No. (Except for the very minor risks that always come with it.)

I know in Germany the recommendation for the MMR vaccine is to just give it to all adults that aren't sure if they got it as a child (for all adults born after 1970, because they assume all born before almost certainly had the disease).

I was sure of my childhood vaccination history and not sure whether I had received an adult booster shot or not. The pharmacist was happy to give me the shot. My doctor subsequently said that medical advice about this might depend on one's particular situation (e.g. travel plans), since different people's risk of either acquiring or spreading measles could vary.

Subsequent shots don't decrease one's immunity, but they can still produce the same side effects as the initial vaccination, which are usually mild. For example, I experienced mild arm soreness for four to five days, which is the most common MMR side effect.

Feel free to ask your own doctor or pharmacist! :-)

Before the introduction of measles vaccine in 1963 and widespread vaccination, major epidemics occurred approximately every 2–3 years and measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/measles

So, you were saying?

In EU on medical leaflets risk for various side effects of drug is in form 1 in 10^N cases where N varies.

US leaflets contain useless word descriptions.

Hint: After reading EU style leaflet you know 1 in 10000 rate is very high for nasty side effect. Rare is something like 1 in 1000000

This "safely be unvaccinated" nonsense is part of the problem with anti-vaxxers.

It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work: For highly contagious diseases you need to ensure that the vast majority of the population is vaccinated, in the order of 90+%. Otherwise your "choice" puts immuno-compromised people at people at risk, it puts pre-immunisation infants at risk, and finally it drastically increases the likelihood of the virus mutating such that the vaccine no longer works for everyone.

If you actually read the article you'd see that this is an increase of 75 people beyond the existing 800+ people [1], in the pre-vaccination world 500 thousand cases were reported a year, 48000 requiring hospitalization, 1000 with encephalitis, and 450 deaths[2]. This was with a population of around ~200 million, vs 329 million now[3], so this increases to 750k infections, 72k hospitalization, and 675 deaths (better hospital care may reduce this).

So you're saying 30k adverse events (which is a gross exaggeration, as the events apply only to children <7 years old, and the side effects while bad are still better than death, but based on [4] this is around 3.5k not small but < 6x the number of fatalities)

Note this is assuming a 1 in 10k rate of adverse side effects, a subject of which of debate - antivaxxers claim higher, others saying only about 67% of adverse reactions following vaccination are attributable to the measles component [5]. For measles the rate of encephalitis is 1 in 1000,

Minor additional note, per [5], the most common of the really bad adverse responses is seizures, but the seizures have no long term side effects (as opposed to long term neurological damage from actually getting measles). The minor adverse reactions all last 2-3 days, Thrombocytopenia (whatever that is) is usually benign and transient.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatssli...

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

[4] https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-popul...

[5] https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/initiative/tools/MMR_vacc...

For measles, herd immunity requires a 95% vaccination rate. So where there are outbreaks they have apparently dropped below that. Would the entire population drop below that, at least 5% of the entire population would get measles. Since a lot more than 0.2% would suffer nasty side effects from measles, I said 1 in 10k, because even if it were 1 in 10k, the country would be better off with more than 95% getting vaccinations.

I thought I could riff on olliej’s obviously sardonic comment, but as you I seem to have miscalculated how the comment is read.

I hadn't: I jumped the gun thinking that you were sharing 10 minutes of anti-vaccination propaganda, and offering up ammunition for people who think "Well those guys over there say otherwise, so who knows?" My apologies for that.

My point was that planting the poison pill of "Are vaccines dangerous?" is itself dangerous, and despite the video's good intentions might still apply here.

As a popular video, it'll appear in sidebars more than it'll be watched. I worry that in that capacity, it'll maybe snare a bunch of no-vaccination believers in the honeypot, but will plant the safety question into the minds of many more.

My concern is tempered by the understanding that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation knows what it's doing here, but the choice to make an informative campaign clandestine strikes me as an odd one with potential negative side effects.

And neither should immigrants be blithely blamed.

It is, as with many things, a mix of all things. But the decrease in vaccination rates is _definitely_ a huge contributing factor in many of the outbreaks. See, e.g.,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/

Vaccination doesn't solve the problem of infected people bringing in measles from outside the country.

When did I say I want to stop millions of people from "traveling"? First off, you can't have a country without borders. Secondly, you can have migration but in a modern world you can't just let people flow through. That's why we had Ellis Island, people could be vetted for things such as deadly diseases and possibly be vaccinated before being let into the country.