I’m Waiting for One Photogenic Child to Die of Measles
A single adorable victim will remind anti-vaxxer parents what is really at stake
In the 1920’s, Gerald and Sara Murphy lived such an idyllic existence in France that F. Scott Fitzgerald used them as the models for his perfect American expatriate family in his novel “Tender Is the Night.”
In “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” their biographer describes the moment that shattered their charmed life. After nursing their fragile younger son through a bout with tuberculosis in a sanitarium in the Alps, they got word that his 15-year-old elder brother, “a strapping and indefatigable boy who had scarcely been sick a day in his life, had caught measles at the boarding school he was attending, and without warning it had developed into spinal meningitis; he died almost immediately, before Sara and Gerald could get there.”
That’s what measles can do to an unvaccinated child.
True, deaths from measles are not common. But neither are they vanishly rare. Nor is encephalitis, deafness or other complications. As this MedPage Today article describes, children who survive a bout can die even years later as the dormant virus revives and slowly eats away their brain. As shown in these British videos, that complication, sub-acute sclerosing panencephalitis, can do the same damage a car wreck or a bomb blast can, turning a bright college student into a mental toddler before the lapse into a long, fatal coma.
Today, thanks to the anti-vaxx lobby’s predation on American parents, measles — eradicated in the U.S. 25 years ago — is circulating among our children again.
Already this year, cases have been found in 15 states. Even more worrying: a recent CDC report found that 3 percent of children entering kindergarten in 2022 had vaccine exemptions — the highest rate ever.
We have Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a dozen other vaccine denialists to thank for that (although I would bet money that their children are vaccinated.) In Florida, the state’s controversial surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, is doing his best to turn a local cluster into a superspreader event by countermanding sound medical advice. For years, public health wisdom has held that unvaccinated children who’ve been exposed to measles should stay away from classmates until it is clear they either didn’t catch the virus or have recovered. One sick child can infect a whole room before his rash even appears. Instead, Dr. Ladapo is “deferring to parents” as to whether to let their children go to school, putting everyone else’s children at risk. His letter did not even suggest vaccination.
To me, this doesn’t just feel like medical malpractice. It smacks of advice that could someday be tantamount to manslaughter.
In any given year, about there are about 4 million kindergarteners in this country. Three percent means about 120,000 unprotected children a year entering a rough-and-tumble milieu where germs roam free. That’s enough to support a serious surge, especially in a low-vaccination state like Idaho. If we do eventually get a runaway epidemic, a death toll of one child per 5,000 — the current rate in Western Europe even with modern medical care — we’ll be looking at 24 dead children and three or four times that many with brain damage. In each age group.
Is that an “acceptable” number? Perhaps if you’re sure it will happen only to some other family. Not if it’s yours.
Parents can be stubborn about insisting that they are doing right by their child, no matter what the data say. Arguing with them, I’ve found, is futile. So what usually triggers the first twinge of fear that they might be wrong? Seeing someone else’s child die.
There is nothing like a picture. Eight years ago, no one really cared about the dozens of Syrians drowning in the Mediterranean as they tried to make it to Europe in flimsy boats — until Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old in a red shirt, washed up dead on a Turkish beach.
Four years ago, even people who vehemently oppose illegal migration across our southern border were moved by pictures of two-year-old Valeria Martinez dead in the Rio Grande, still clinging to her father.
When American children do start dying of measles, I hope there are pictures. I hope the full weight of the tasteless, abusive, headline-hunting addiction of the American media is brought to bear.
I do hope the first dead child to be exploited by us in the media belongs to parents who refused to vaccinate him or her — not to parents of an infant who was too young or too medically fragile to vaccinate. I hope those parents’ hearts are as brokens as the Murphys’. I hope they are prostrate with grief and ready to publicly thrash themselves for having made a foolish decision.
Five years ago, when I was covering infectious diseases for The New York Times, I tried hard to find just such a family.
A serious measles epidemic was sweeping the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Rockland County, an epidemic created by anti-vaxxers who had targeted Jewish families with a pamphlet claiming vaccines were treyf — not kosher — because they contained minute amounts of gelatin stabilizer derived from pig skin. (Some do, but every major rabbinical body in the world has endorsed vaccines and ruled that denatured gelatin delivered by needle in no way violates Jewish laws against eating pork.)
I had heard that a few ultra-Orthodox children were hospitalized in NYU Langone Hospital, fighting for their lives. I asked the Langone media department to ask the doctors to ask the parents of those children if they would be willing to speak to me. I had, I said, spoken to other parents — in Pakistan and Nigeria — who regretted not having vaccinated their children against polio because now those children were crippled for life.
I almost succeeded. The doctors sent word that they had two families who were considering it.
And then it all fell apart. The international edition of The New York Times printed a cartoon depicting Benjamin Netanyahu as a seeing-eye dachshund leading a blind Donald Trump.
Although the cartoon’s real point was to say Netanyahu was manipulating Trump, it was denounced as anti-Semitic because of old Nazi tropes depicting Jews as dogs. There was an uproar against the Times. The doctors passed word that both families had backed out of talking to me.
Soon, I imagine, some other reporter will get the chance I missed. A major outbreak seems inevitable. When it happens, I hope there will be pictures. I hope they will be heart-breaking. I hope the parents will be brave enough to admit that their lives were shattered by their own choice.
I hope it exposes the vile disservice the anti-vax lobby has done to our children. And I hope it scares at least 120,000 parents into protecting theirs.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. is the author of The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons From 25 Years of Covering Pandemics, which was published in January.
