One in six toddlers have not completed their routine series of vaccinations, leaving them vulnerable to a host of deadly diseases.
And one in 10 haven’t even started one of the seven shots, a new study has found.
With flare-ups of measles and polio spreading across the nation, diseases once thought to be left in the past, the US has already seen the consequences of vaccination rates dipping.
The findings come amid a growing anti-vaxx movement across the country that
Twenty-seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, our defenses against the coronavirus seem at once stronger and more penetrable than ever. A growing majority of the U.S. population now has some immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, whether from vaccination, past infection, or both. However, staggeringly infectious members of the Omicron family have demonstrated an ability to evade some of those protections. Since April, they have led to a quadrupling of daily coronavirus cases; the U.S.
For much of the past year, Americans have guided their behavior using a kind of cognitive triangulation. First, we’ve judged the risks of a coronavirus infection; second, we’ve assessed our willingness to accept those risks; and third, we’ve mulled the value, or perhaps the necessity, of our proposed activities. You may be willing to risk an encounter with the virus to do your job, or to attend your daughter’s graduation, but a trip to the dentist? Maybe not.
The last
At the start of the American Revolution, ninety per cent of the deaths in the Continental Army were due to disease. Smallpox was especially devastating: nearly a third of those infected died. General George Washington weighed an Army-wide mandate for smallpox inoculation—a procedure with a mortality rate of around two per cent. The mandate was sure to meet resistance, and could signal to the British how beset the Americans were by illness. Still, on February 6, 1777, he sent a
For most of the year, Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the northern tip of Cape Cod, has around three thousand residents. In summertime, however, it becomes a vacation destination and gay mecca. Thousands of visitors typically descend for festivals, concerts, parades, comedy shows, and parties organized around themed weeks. Almost all of this has been suspended during the pandemic; in June, Provincetown didn’t record a single coronavirus case. Then, in early July, thousands of gay men arrived for Circuit Party week. The
