Last summer, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an internal presentation on the coronavirus, which was leaked to the press, called the Delta variant of covid-19 “as transmissible as chicken pox.”
Although the claim was found to be overstated, it’s easy to see why researchers may have been predisposed to draw parallels between the two diseases.
There was also a kind of wistfulness in the comparison. A vaccine for varicella received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, and within a decade forty states and the District of Columbia added varicella as a required immunization for enrollment in public elementary schools.
Today all fifty states enforce this mandate. (Medical and religious exemptions vary state by state.) Near-universal mandatory immunization against chicken pox virtually eliminated the disease in the space of a generation.
This past October, a coronavirus vaccine for children aged five to eleven received emergency-use authorization from the F.D.A.; since then, a little more than eighteen per cent of eligible children in the U.S. have received the two shots required for vaccination.
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Perhaps it’s only natural to long, a little, for the before-time of chicken pox, when the question was whether we would be able to wipe out a disease and not, once we had the capability, whether we would choose to do it.
