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Comment by PenelopeHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the author really went out of their way to avoid saying why this is happening repeatedly in Rockland County.

> The Orthodox Jewish community, the largest in the country, have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the state; Monsey's is the lowest in the state, at 17.8%, as of June 15, 2021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockland_County,_New_York#Heal...

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I lived in a Brooklyn neighborhood densely populated by Hasidim for years and this is unfortunately not the first time something like this has happened.[0] The highly insular community means misinformation is hard to combat. This quote is pertinent:

> ”Being a religious Jew, you also get used to having a minority viewpoint,” said Alexander Rapaport, the CEO of the Masbia Soup Kitchen Network in Brooklyn, and a public face of the Hasidic community. “So if something is not mainstream, it doesn’t take you away from believing it.”

[0] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/11/9/18068036/me...

Even in my country, where we generally despise religious conservatives, orthodox Jewish community is rarely criticized.

I understand the historical reasons of course but it is not helpful. All must be uplifted from darkness.

That's probably less of a smoking gun than it seems like. This case was only discovered because someone actually suffered from paralysis, which is somewhat uncommon even in the unvaccinated and extremely uncommon amongst the vaccinated. The thing is, although it gives very strong protection against paralysis and death the inactivated vaccine used in countries like the US probably isn't all that effective at preventing people catching and spreading polio - all of the polio elimination efforts globally have used the oral polio vaccine which contains live virus for this reason. It's not used in the developed world because the serious side effect rate is hard to justify in a country where polio no longer exists.

I'm in the US and I had an oral polio vaccine.

Okay, I should probably have been a bit clearer about that. Polio eradication efforts everywhere in the world, including the US, were based around the oral polio vaccine due to its apparent benefits in stopping vaccinated people from spreading polio. This was discontinued in the developed world, including the USA, a couple of decades ago (edit: and replaced with the inactivated polio vaccine - I though this was clear enough from the context...) after polio was eliminated there and the risk of spread from other countries was considered low enough. Entire age groups have never been vaccinated using the OPV. And of course it doesn't matter how well protected the population as a whole is if there's a subcommunity of people who regularly interact with each other who aren;t...

> This was discontinued in the developed world, including the USA, a couple of decades ago after polio was eliminated there and the risk of spread from other countries was considered low enough.

Where are you getting this information from?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/immunize.htm

All those vaccinations will be the inactivated polio vaccine, since it's the only polio vaccine in use in the USA since 2000: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/index.html

When? According to the article, it hasn't been used here since 2000.

Edit: I believe I did, too, but that would have been back in the 1970s.

Whats the vaccination rate for polio outside of this area? I suspect it's quite low, it's not in the standard vaccine series for most in the US to my knowledge due to low risk now. Outside of some older people and immigrants, I think many aren't vaccinated for polio.

The inactivated virus variant of the polio vaccine is still in the standard childhood immunization schedule in the US:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...

92.6% of children by age 24 months

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/immunize.htm

All my kids got the vaccine and I even got a booster before I went to Israel.

> it's not in the standard vaccine series for most in the US

It absolutely is. It's low risk because everyone is vaccinated.

You might be thinking of the smallpox vaccine.

Or the oral (active) polio vaccine?

Bingo, whoops. Not sure why I mixed up polio and smallpox but you nailed it.

When I saw the article I thought exactly the same thing. I had to check the Kaiser app, but apparently I have had 4 polio shots as a child.

I don't have the smallpox vaccine though. I know my mom has a big scar on the inside of her arm from that one, so I am pretty sure they've phased that one out.

I just confirmed both my kids have the polio vaccines from the standard set given to kids. The polio vaccine is called IPV (inactivated poliovirus) and usually comes in a bundle branded as PENTACEL which is “a 5-in-1 combination vaccine that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, and Haemophilus influenzae type B”.

It's in the standard schedule for kids: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...

They get 3 doses before they turn 15 months old, in fact.

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