The Importance of Vaccines and Community Protection
Farewell darlings we have laid you side by side beneath this sod. Buds of earth all fadeless blooming in the garden of our God.
Sleep dear ones, in thy quiet bed Among those fading flowers. And we will strive to feel these words. “God’s will be done-not ours.”
Inscription on the gravestone of William and Mary Sprague.
It was a beautiful autumn day in Providence, Rhode Island, and while basking in fall color, I wandered into the historic Swan Point Cemetery. A Cemetery is a place where we can find beauty and solace and commune with those who lived before us – a time machine that connects us to the past and gives us a glimpse into the lives of our ancestors – their fears, joys, and sorrows.
Over the grave of Mary and William Sprague is a statue of a girl lying in repose, her arm cradling the head of a small child. He is snuggled into her, his arm draped over her belly. William died in 1860 at the age of 2, and his sister Mary died a few months later at the age of 10.
The pain of losing a child is unfathomable and the greatest pain a parent can experience. William and Mary’s parents knew this pain twice within a few months. Walking around an old cemetery, you see so many children’s monuments and realize that our predecessors knew this pain all too well.
In the year 1800, more than 1 in 3 children did not make it to their fifth birthday. By 1900, that number was closer to 1 in 6. In 2020, it dropped to about 1 in 150.
A lot happened between 1800 and today that helped our children live the long, relatively disease-free lives that we have now. Our shelter improved to protect us, our childhoods became more guarded, and we had more reliable access to food.
But perhaps the largest part of that improvement was how we were able to eliminate infections. Clean water and improved sanitation greatly reduced infectious diseases. The development of antibiotic medications like penicillin helped doctors treat serious
infections that could sometimes be fatal. Most impressively, the development of vaccines for common illnesses offered an incredibly effective and safe way to prevent illnesses before they even started. Vaccinations helped eliminate deaths and disabilities from diseases like measles, polio, whooping cough, and diphtheria.
Vaccines helped so much that we sort of forgot about some of the infections and the havoc that they caused. Smallpox outbreaks which decimated whole communities of people, have largely been forgotten. The last polio survivor to rely on an iron lung to breathe died only last year at age 78. Now we only know diphtheria as the “D” and whooping cough as the “P” (for pertussis) in the DPT vaccine. We no longer know them as the illnesses that took our neighbor’s newborn’s life.
And we must never forget.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, from 2018-2020, there was a serious outbreak of measles with about half a million cases and about 8,000 deaths. Most of those who died were children under the age of five. The outbreak was not because people chose not to vaccinate their children against measles, but because of the challenge of getting the vaccine to the population.
8,000 pairs of parents suffered the pain that no parent should ever have to suffer.
As I write this, the United States is in the midst of an outbreak of measles in Texas and New Mexico, mostly among unvaccinated people. One child has died, and her parents are suffering the unimaginable. It is the first death in the United States from measles in about a decade.
Vaccines help us in a variety of ways. They help prevent the person who gets the vaccine from getting the illness or by decreasing the severity of the illness – that’s easy and straightforward.
Another way vaccines help us, which is less obvious but may be more important, is creating protection in a whole community. A good example is with pertussis, the bacterium that causes whooping cough. Serious illness and deaths from pertussis happen mostly in children under 2 months old. Unfortunately, we do not start vaccinating and protecting children until they are older (and even then, it takes a series of vaccines to get them completely protected). But we have a great tool to protect those most vulnerable little ones. We have each other!
If everyone older than 2 months of age gets vaccinated, then all of us older folks are protected. The illness then has no hold in the community and the unprotected 1-month old is never exposed and cannot get it. The chain of transmission is broken.
When everyone gets vaccinated, all our families are protected. It’s the ultimate way of paying it forward. We are all saving each other. But there’s a catch – it only works if everyone participates.
Even though many instill unfounded fear about vaccines, the science is very clear. Vaccines work and are very safe. They are a gift – a way to do so much good for ourselves and, more importantly, for each other. Moreover, we can better avoid the unimaginable pain of losing a child or loved one. We may sometimes fail to appreciate this great gift, but so many parents throughout our history did not have this luxury.
The pain of losing a child, or any loved one, is an eternal part of the human experience. But the presence of vaccines is an unprecedented blessing in our collective history.
The best tribute we can pay to Mary and William Sprague, and countless other nameless children, is to remember our history, acknowledge the great price they have paid, and use the gifts we have been given to never let this happen again.
Created by: Seth Husney
Edited by: Adam Husney
