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.
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.2 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.
