The worst outbreak of chickenpox since the vaccine against the disease became readily available over 20 years ago has hit the Asheville, North Carolina, area. How could this happen? Religious exemption + anti-vaccination malarkey = bad public health decisions. The Asheville Citizen Times reports that the Asheville Waldorf School has been hit with 39 cases of chickenpox, which is unsurprising when you consider that it has “one of the highest vaccination religious exemption rates in the state.”
During the 2017-2018 school year, the last for which data were available, Asheville Waldorf had a higher rate of religious exemptions for vaccination than all but two other schools in the state.
Of the 28 kindergartners who enrolled that year, 19 had an exemption to at least one vaccination required by the state for school entry.
According to the Citizen Times, the only two schools with higher rates of exemption are private schools with 100 percent exemptions. According to the Washington Post, the number of children under two years of age who have not received any vaccinations has quadrupled since 2001. And while North Carolina requires all school-age children attending school to be immunized, it does allow for religious exemption.
The virus used to crop up in about 4 million cases annually in the United States, causing more than 10,000 hospitalizations and between 100 and 150 deaths. Children were especially susceptible, as schools seemed to incubate the blisterlike rash, which appears first on the stomach, back and face and can extend over the entire surface of the body, creating as many as 500 itchy blisters.
Five years ago a study found that, since the use of the chickenpox vaccination, the numbers of infection were 9-10 times lower than before. Some people continue to use that age-old “when I was a kid, it wasn’t a big deal” refrain, because they don’t understand science or have the less-than-narcissistic capacity to perceive that the world is filled with people outside of themselves and the people they’ve seen in front of their faces at a gathering.