“As we gain on covid, we’re losing ground against diseases we’ve already defeated”, says an article by The Washington Post.
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases such as Measles and Polio which we’ve already created global immunity for. This is due to two reasons: pandemic-induced disruption of routine childhood vaccinations and an increase in vaccine hesitancy due to the politicization of the Covid vaccines.
In 2019, the World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitancy as one of 10 threats to global health in the Thirteenth General Program of Work for the five-year period 2019-2023. Due to “aggressive antivaccination campaigns”, vaccine-preventable diseases such as Measles were on the rise. Between 2015 to 2019, Measles cases had increased by 50% worldwide. Even in the United States where the disease was eliminated in 2000, 1300 cases were reported.
Of course, the unforeseen Covid pandemic made this threat a lot worse.
According to The Washington Post article, the Covid-19 pandemic “supercharged this movement” by “providing fertile ground for anti-vaccine advocates as well as politically-driven, state-sponsored disinformation actors”.
One big challenge standing in the way of achieving global immunity against Covid is “the alignment of vaccine uptake with political ideology”. In the United States, this reflects in the red-blue political vaccine gap: 90 percent of Democrats are in favor of vaccinating their children compared to only 19 percent of Republicans. This divide is not only impacting immunity against Covid but also other diseases. A YouGov poll shows that now fewer than half of Republicans are in support of childhood vaccines – representing a 13 point decline since 2019.
Additionally, red states such as Nebraska and Montana are passing new legislation to make exemptions from childhood vaccine requirements easier. 11 states have also filed lawsuits in response to Biden’s Covid vaccine mandate for businesses. In mid-October, West Virginia passed a bill forcing businesses to allow employees exemptions from the vaccines. Recently, Iowa passed a similar bill allowing employees to seek religious and medical exemptions from Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
Coming back to vaccine-preventable diseases, in July, WHO reported that more than 23 million children missed out on immunizations in 2020. Whether this was due to a disruption of health services or growing vaccine hesitancy – or both as per The Washington Post article – this news is alarming.
The article also explains how the percentage of vaccinated required for global immunity is different for different diseases: 95 percent for measles, 80 percent for polio etc. Regardless, the decrease in childhood immunizations threatens both global health and global economy (by increasing the likelihood of disease poverty).
Overall, the article makes a strong argument and successfully argues that Covid-19 has caused a rise in other diseases due to a decrease in immunizations. Although the article correctly identifies vaccine hesitancy and disruption of health services as the leading cause for this, my only criticism is the lack of mention of the global vaccine divide and how this links to vaccine hesitancy and disruption of health services.
The article has also substantiated the main argument with ample statistics which are relevant and correct as I have fact checked. However, it does not include statistics to show the supposed “rise” in other diseases, for example, stats related to the total number of measles cases reported this year or references to case studies where a certain disease was misdiagnosed. Adding these stats would have helped make the main argument sounder.