We see the same stories every year: “A dozen children infected with measles in California! Anti-vaccine extremists to blame!”
The media and mainstream medicine’s fixation on measles is ridiculous.
Measles has been around for hundreds of years. It started as a zoonotic disease spread between cattle before it made the jump to humans. It’s been described by the Aztecs, Persians, and is even thought to have caused the Plague of Galen.
But that was then, and this is now. Nowadays, there’s practically no reason to worry about measles. Let’s get into it.
This is not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before making decisions.
What Measles Is
Measles is a highly contagious viral illness that causes very mild symptoms in most people. It starts like a normal virus - fever, cough, runny nose. Then Koplik’s spots form in the mouth. Finally, a rash develops starting on the face and descending over the rest of the body.
In a very small percentage of people, there are more severe symptoms. Seizures, blindness, and encephalitis (brain swelling). This is uncommon, as we’ll get into.
Measles is very contagious. One of the most contagious viruses on the planet.
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What Measles Is Not
Measles is not a highly deadly disease. It is not the scary virus the media likes to talk about. It is not a world-ender.
Unless you’re immunocompromised, you don’t really have to worry about it much. It’s a mild inconvenience.
You’ll never be able to prevent exposure to measles. It’s so highly contagious and mild in most people, that you probably will never know how often you’re exposed. You would just think you had a cold most times.
It seems the vaccine actually does a decent job of preventing or lowering the reported cases. This is the chart they love to show.
It’s all well and good that they reduced the number of measles cases. But was it worth it? As we’ve discussed, in health and medicine it’s all about tradeoffs. Was the reduction in cases worth any potential side effects from the vaccine?
Well here’s the chart they don’t show you:
Turns out, measles was already very treatable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, people did just fine with it.
Treatment
Treating measles is pretty easy. We do what’s called “supportive care.” This means you hydrate the patient and give them cold medicine if they want it. This is all that’s necessary in > 99/100 cases.
The other therapy we have nowadays is vitamin A. Turns out when you are deficient in vitamin A, your risk of severe measles goes way up. That’s why it still kills people in the Third World. It rarely kills people in America because we have abundant access to food and nutrients.
This has been known for a long time. Even in 1964 when the first vaccine came out, it was unpopular with the smart people. This article in the British Medical Journal is worth a read.
Here’s my favorite quote:
In Great Britain at the moment it is not necessarily logical to say, “We can produce a vaccine; let us therefore use it."
Measles Vaccine
The measles vaccine is reported to be highly effective. Maybe it was at one time. The charts seem to indicate that it is.
But we still regularly see outbreaks in areas with very high vaccination rates. Search online and you can find dozens of these stories. So clearly, it’s not as effective as we are told.
And it’s not a benign vaccine.
There was a time when I would have thought, “meh, the shot is tested and looks ok. There’s no evidence it causes problems.”
Fortunately, Children’s Health Defense has provided a ton of data on this topic. Here’s an article discussing the links between the measles vaccine and autism.
CHD also has studies showing links between the measles vaccine and:
febrile seizures
increased risk of psychiatric disorders later in life
epilepsy
language deficits
neurodevelopmental disorders (such as autism)
And others
If you want to read more about it, here’s a good article.
It should also be noted that the measles vaccine is most often given as a combination vaccine along with mumps and rubella, or some other combo. I wrote about combo vaccines, and why you should avoid them, here:
Wrapping Up
If you have a healthy child with adequate nutrition, don’t sweat measles. It will very likely be a mild illness and your child is unlikely to be exposed anyway. If your child is immunocompromised then you should consider the vaccine.
I hope you’ve learned something from this article.
Later this week we’ll be moving on to Mumps, and then Rubella.
Interesting perspective! What do you think about the argument that measles is potentially deadlier than other viruses due to its ability to induce immune amnesia?
For reference, this graph provides a slightly more granular view of measles cases and deaths in the United States, from 1921 to 2015: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death
I was about to respond to that first chart, then I continued to read and calmed down.