After watching John Leake interview Dr. Andrew Wakefield, I wanted to verify a point made by Dr. Wakefield: the case fatality rate (CFR) of measles had already dropped by more than an order of magnitude (making measles virulence similar to the flu), prior to any vaccine for measles.
Here are the case fatality rates for measles in the USA:
Flu case fatality rates would be much less than 0.5%, just like that for measles in 1950. Here is the same graph with notes in it:
It’s difficult to ignore the coincidental timing of the new CDC recommendation to double-up on the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in 1989, and the almost exponential rise in the case fatality of measles after that.
By 2002, measles had been made more virulent than it was back in 1921. That’s not progress. Evidence suggests that MMR vaccines may have had something to do with measles becoming a dangerous disease again, like it was prior to 1925.
Critics may retort that the case rate for measles dropped after the implementation of a measles vaccine. While true, it is an open question as to whether that drop is a new development or merely the continuation of a prior trend:
While measles vaccination appears to have helped to drive the yearly case rate down below 11 yearly cases per 100,000 — i.e., what it was in 1990 — given an apparent downward trend ever since 1941, it isn’t clear by how far the cases would have dropped without the vaccine:
Notice the pattern of heavy years followed by light years as far as incidence goes, as if immunity from prior heavy years is carried into the next year. Even with the undulation though, the general trend is downward, as the regression line shows.
While not very reliable, extrapolation of the trend line forward in time predicts that, without a vaccine, measles would go “extinct” in the year of 1990 (0 cases per 100,000). It is more likely that something like 1 or 2 cases per 100,000 would be found though — 5.5 to 11 times less measles cases than that were actually found in 1990.
Also unclear is whether the trade-off involving the recent rise in virulence, which may have something to do with the double-dosing of MMR (which coincided with the rising virulence), is “worth it.”
Reference
[CDC recommends doubling the MMR dose in 1989] — CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00041753.htm
[measles cases and deaths in the USA] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death
[measles timeline] — PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-bad-is-the-measles-comeback-heres-70-years-of-data