Report affirms that vaccines save lives and money
If you were around in 1989 and 1990, the things you probably remember most about those days are the Berlin Wall falling, the invasion of Kuwait and the lead-up Operation Desert Storm, watching “Twin Peaks” on TV or “Batman” in a movie theater or purchasing hot albums by M.C. Hammer or Paula Abdul.
Most people, however, would be hard-pressed to recall the measles outbreak that spread across the United States. It resulted in more than 20,000 cases, most of them affecting poor children in inner cities. New York City alone saw 5,000 cases and more than 20 deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigated and found that more than half of the children who were infected were vulnerable because they had never received a measles vaccine. This helped lead to the creation of the Vaccines for Children program, which covers the costs of shots for families that can’t afford them. On the 30th anniversary of its creation, a report was published last week on just how effective vaccines have been over the last three decades in preventing severe illness, saving money and saving lives.
The report found that for children born between 1994 and 2003, who are themselves now adults, routine vaccination prevented more than 500 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and a little more than 1 million deaths. To put it in dollars-and-cents terms, vaccines have saved the economy more than $540 billion and society as a whole more than $2 trillion.
Fangjun Zhou, a CDC researcher, explained that “staying up to date with recommended childhood vaccines is one of the best ways to prevent disease, reduce the burden on the health care system and reduce health care costs.”
Vaccines are one of the wonders of our age, sending deadly infectious diseases like smallpox to the dustbin of history. And yet, as has been well-publicized in recent years, there have been pockets of vaccine resistance in this country and in other parts of the world, fueled by misinformation and petulance. Some have been duped by snake-oil salesmen like independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long been pushing false claims that vaccines are unsafe. Some have been taken in by lies that circulate on the internet. Then, there are some people who resist vaccination for themselves or their children because it’s something the government or some other authority wants them to do and, darn it, no one bosses them around!
But we saw during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic the hideous results of saying no to vaccines – estimates are that of the 641,000 people who died of COVID-19 in the United States after vaccines became available, half could have lived if only they had been vaccinated.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, has noted that rates of childhood mortality have dropped appreciably over the last three decades, and much of the credit should go to vaccines.
He put it well: “Vaccines are a miracle.”