"A Dangerous Tipping Point" for Vaccination

This is very discouraging, but unsurprising, news about declining vaccination rates in America.  It's from JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and here are some excerpts:

Is Vaccination Approaching a Dangerous Tipping Point?
byPeter Marks, MD, PhD; Robert Califf, MD

"Vaccination is one of the most highly effective public health interventions, responsible for saving millions of lives each year. In the US, authorized or approved preventive vaccines must be manufactured with high quality, and the effectiveness and favorable safety profile of vaccines must be demonstrated. Their safety over time is also closely and continuously monitored through multiple overlapping passive and active safety surveillance systems, including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, and the BEST Sentinel Initiative.

"Despite the care taken in the development and deployment of vaccines and their clear and compelling benefit of saving individual lives and improving population health outcomes, an increasing number of people in the US are now declining vaccination for a variety of reasons, ranging from safety concerns to religious beliefs. Setting aside for now the controversial issue of vaccine mandates at the federal, state, or local level in the US, which are not within the purview of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the situation has now deteriorated to the point that population immunity against some vaccine-preventable infectious diseases is at risk, and thousands of excess deaths are likely to occur this season due to illnesses amenable to prevention or reduction in severity of illness with vaccines.

"To counter the current trend, we urge the clinical and biomedical community to redouble its efforts to provide accurate plain-language information regarding the individual and collective benefits and risks of vaccination. Such information is now needed because vaccines have been so successful in achieving their intended effects that many people no longer see the disturbing morbidity and mortality from infections amenable to vaccines. For example, smallpox has been eradicated, and polio has been eliminated from the US, through effective vaccination campaigns.

"Measles was similarly eliminated, but imported cases remain a threat to those who are unvaccinated as well as to those who are immunocompromised. Regrettably, pediatric vaccine hesitancy now has been responsible for several measles outbreaks in the US, including a recent one in central Ohio involving local acquired cases in 85 children, 36 of whom (42%) had to be hospitalized for complications. It is sobering to note that vaccine hesitancy to childhood vaccines, such as the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, has been found to cluster in middle- to high-income areas among parents with at least a college degree who preferred social media narratives over evidence-based vaccine information delivered by clinicians. Anyone doubting the benefits of vaccination need only look to low-income parts of the world where measles vaccination is inaccessible, and many thousands of children continue to die each year due to preventable disease. Unfortunately, with the success of pediatric vaccination campaigns to date, increasing numbers of people have become complacent and underestimate the actual risk of forgoing vaccination.

In addition to making a difference regarding childhood immunization, communication regarding the potential benefits of vaccination can hopefully also improve the number of individuals accepting vaccination to protect against COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus disease. Vaccination rates against these respiratory pathogens are inadequate, and this is most distressing in older individuals in whom the benefits of vaccination in reducing hospitalization and death are eminently clear. In fact, uptake of the updated COVID-19 vaccine (XBB.1.5 monovalent) in the US is only about 35% in those older than 65 years, which is about half the rate in this age group in the UK.

"What can we do to start tipping the scales in the direction of evidence-informed vaccine acceptance to reduce the risk of death and illness from diseases in which vaccines are effective? Evidence indicates that the most trusted source of information about health decisions remains clinicians who provide care."
....

"We believe that the best way to counter the current large volume of vaccine misinformation is to dilute it with large amounts of truthful, accessible scientific evidence. To reduce deaths, hospitalization, and the burden on families and the health care system, all those directly interacting with individuals in a health care setting, ranging from front office staff to retail pharmacists to primary care physicians, need to focus at every appropriate opportunity on helping to ensure that individuals have the necessary information to make informed choices regarding vaccination, considering the benefits and risks. By doing so, we can both help prevent pediatric infectious diseases and dramatically reduce the harm from pathogens such as COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus disease before we have another large wave of any of these vaccine-preventable illnesses. We will do our part at FDA by continuing to provide health care clinicians and the general public with timely and accurate information in plain language to help explain the benefits and risks of vaccination."

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Unfortunately, we're in another large wave now, and people are still refusing to be vaccinated. The medical community and the FDA do a great job of leading horses to water, but they still can't make them drink. How about getting the media involved and run an ad campaign on TV and in print about the benefits of vaccination? Get celebrities involved if that will help. If people still choose to be unvaccinated and allow their kids to be unvaccinated, then they have nobody to blame but themselves - as they are undoubtedly doing right now.