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There has been a big to-do on Twitter mocking Darla Shine, who claimed that people would be better off getting the measles than getting vaccinated against it
https://www.thedailybeast.com/darla-shine-wife-of-top-trump-official-goes-on-pro-measles-anti-vaccine-rant
She is quite mockable, but I was eye-rolly about the number of people who decided that the thing to challenge was her statement “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids.” People kept saying that she must mean Chicken Pox, for which there was no vaccine in the US until the late 1990s (? after mid 1990s, anyway). Of course, they said, Boomers would have been vaccinated against the measles. I had a polite exchange with one of those people, saying that maybe Shine thought it was all Boomers because every Boomer she knew had had the measles. It certainly was my experience that almost everybody my age had all of the MMR and chicken pox diseases in childhood. They are easily spread, and the spots don't show up in measles until after one is contagious, so one kid in a classroom would have been enough to infect many. My correspondent checked with her mother, who said that she had had the measles "Everybody did." Correspondent: "I guess I assumed the vaccine was older than that." My experience is that things work better when one assumes nothing (I even have the t-shirt), but I will acknowledge that with quick searching I can't find exactly when the vaccine would have been widespread in the US. The Rubella (which we called German measles) part was added in 1967, so it must have been before that. I turned 12 in 1967, and all those diseases were behind me.
I have a friend who believed the "you'll be stronger if you have the real disease instead of the shot" claim - his entire family of children and step-children went through Whooping cough (pertussis) in the 1990s because they weren't vaccinated. I wonder if the parents thought that the children would be better off having tetanus as well - in the US, pertussis, tetanus, and diphtheria are combined in one shot, but maybe in Germany they were separate.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/darla-shine-wife-of-top-trump-official-goes-on-pro-measles-anti-vaccine-rant
She is quite mockable, but I was eye-rolly about the number of people who decided that the thing to challenge was her statement “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids.” People kept saying that she must mean Chicken Pox, for which there was no vaccine in the US until the late 1990s (? after mid 1990s, anyway). Of course, they said, Boomers would have been vaccinated against the measles. I had a polite exchange with one of those people, saying that maybe Shine thought it was all Boomers because every Boomer she knew had had the measles. It certainly was my experience that almost everybody my age had all of the MMR and chicken pox diseases in childhood. They are easily spread, and the spots don't show up in measles until after one is contagious, so one kid in a classroom would have been enough to infect many. My correspondent checked with her mother, who said that she had had the measles "Everybody did." Correspondent: "I guess I assumed the vaccine was older than that." My experience is that things work better when one assumes nothing (I even have the t-shirt), but I will acknowledge that with quick searching I can't find exactly when the vaccine would have been widespread in the US. The Rubella (which we called German measles) part was added in 1967, so it must have been before that. I turned 12 in 1967, and all those diseases were behind me.
I have a friend who believed the "you'll be stronger if you have the real disease instead of the shot" claim - his entire family of children and step-children went through Whooping cough (pertussis) in the 1990s because they weren't vaccinated. I wonder if the parents thought that the children would be better off having tetanus as well - in the US, pertussis, tetanus, and diphtheria are combined in one shot, but maybe in Germany they were separate.
