The prior generations, from about 1965 on, were vaccinated. There was so-called herd immunity. But once the threat was assumed eliminated, WHO and its partners deployed the scarce money to other, newer threats -- and stopped vaccinating for measles, in remote areas. An entire generation, from about 1995 on, was thus born without much immunity, herd or vaccination induced, at all. Now that is coming back to bite us, globally. Here's the latest -- but there could not be a clearer exemplar of why vaccines are solid -- life saving -- bioscience, than this:
. . .Werra Maulu Botey could not bear to close his daughter’s coffin. Waiting to bury her, he slid the rough wooden lid back, again and again, to adjust her small head and smooth the cloth that cradled it away from her cheeks.
Olive died of measles, at the age of 5, the evening before. She was the first child to die that weekend in an emergency measles treatment center in the town of Bikoro, in the northwest Democratic Republic of Congo. The second was her cousin, a 1-year-old girl.
Measles is sweeping through the children of Bikoro, as it does every couple of years, creeping, then flaring, across this vast country.
It is on the rise in other parts of the world, too -- including in some communities in the United States -- though the measles vaccine has been in use since 1963 and is believed to have saved more lives than any other childhood immunization. . . .
We are better than this: than "tiny coffins" -- anywhere and everywhere. And that putz Kennedy well knows it. He is about the last person on Earth who should lead any health office. . . anywhere. Damnation. Out.
नमस्ते
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