Opponents of vaccines against diseases like measles are simply on the “wrong side,” CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says.
Just how many people are we talking about, and what do we know about them as a group?
Here’s a look at some key numbers.
How many children are unvaccinated?
According to the CDC, in the United States:
• 95% of children in kindergarten have had vaccines for preventable diseases, including two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. But that figure is not spread evenly across the country.
• 82% of children in Colorado have had the two-dose MMR vaccine that doctors say is necessary. In Mississippi, virtually all children in kindergarten (99.7%) are vaccinated.
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• Educated, with college degrees, and
• Covered by private health insurance.
Doctor: How we can win back parents on measles vaccine
In the medical community, conversations are underway about how to reach out to these parents.
“There’s not much we can do about the small core of people who oppose vaccines based on ideology,” Ford Vox, a brain injury doctor in Atlanta, wrote in a CNN column. “… But we have a better shot with the larger and more rational border zone of the vaccine hesitant who may base their concerns on genuine cases of vaccine harm, such as the very small but accepted link between influenza vaccination and a temporary paralysis called Guillain-Barré Syndrome.”
Cultivating “a strong patient-doctor relationship is the most successful method of reversing vaccine opposition,” he wrote. That means carving out a system in which “your doctor is granted the time to truly understand you, while at the same time allowing your doctor to treat you appropriately. … If we’ve done our job right, you’ll seek out the insights we’ve earned from treating many challenging cases over many years. And we’ll know we’ve succeeded in our new relationship when you let us vaccinate your children.”
