Measles: Will It Take a Death to Get Kids Vaccinated?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. My name is Paul Offit. I'm talking to you today from the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

In the past 2 days, we've read about a state of emergency in Washington State, because now 36 children younger than 10 years have suffered measles, and one has been hospitalized. Almost all of those children were unvaccinated because their parents chose not to vaccinate them. The county in which they live (Clark County, Washington) has a rate of vaccination of about 22% of children, creating fertile ground for measles to spread.

This isn't the first instance of this type of outbreak. To put it into perspective, we eliminated measles in the United States in the year 2000. It has come back because a critical number of parents have decided not to vaccinate their children. As a consequence, we had an outbreak in California in 2014-2015 that started in southern California, spread to 25 states, and involved 189 people—again, mostly children who weren't vaccinated.

We've had outbreaks among the Somali community in Minnesota, where Somali Americans had immunization rates drop from the 90% range down to the 40% range because they were scared that vaccines could cause disorders like autism, which obviously isn't true.