One More Thing to Worry About

Mumps is back, in New York City and its environs. About 400 kids have got sick, most of them from an Orthodox Jewish summer camp where one child arrived bearing the virus. It appears that the large majority of infected children had been vaccinated.

How can that be, you say? Because the mumps vaccine (according to a CDC study) is about 85 percent effective. That’s enough when the disease is extremely rare. But once it gets a foothold, that’s not enough–and that, folks, is exactly the point I was pounding on a few weeks ago, about herd immunity. Add to that The Lancet‘s recent retraction of its much-discussed autism study, and you come to the only possible conclusion: It is profoundly senseless not to vaccinate your kid (the patient zero at the summer camp had come from the UK, where the mumps outbreak had reached 4000 mostly unvaccinated kids). Please, folks, let’s let this particular back-to-the-land instinct go.