Anti-Vaxxers Again

We have shown the irrationality of the anti-vaxxer movement and indicated the risks of it. 

A North Carolina school with a large anti-vaccine community is at the heart of the state's largest chickenpox outbreak in decades, officials say. On Friday,36 students at Asheville Waldorf School were diagnosed with it.

The school has one of the state's highest rates of religious exemption, allowing students to skip vaccination. Out of the Waldorf School's 152 students, 110 have not received the vaccine for chickenpox and 67.9% of the school's kindergarten students had religious immunisation exemptions on file in the 2017-2018 school year. Buncombe County, home to the city of Asheville, with a population of over 250,000, has the highest rate of religious-based immunisation exemptions in the state.

The chickenpox vaccine was licensed in the US in 1995. According to the CDC, the vaccine has prevented 3.5 million cases of varicella, 9,000 hospitalisations and 100 deaths annually in the US. Vaccinating also helps protect susceptible individuals who are unable to get the vaccine, like pregnant women, infants younger than one-year-old and cancer patients.