Truth decay: Anti-vaccination movement The high dollar cost of the anti-vaccine movement

“Vaccines are pretty awesome and I, for one, am grateful to have grown up in a time when there wasn’t a debate about their usage or government conspiracies surrounding them,” writes Saskia Popescu, the editor of the Pandora Report.

Unfortunately, she notes, we are in a different situation today and there are some very real consequences of the anti-vaccine movement. Aside from the hundreds of cases of vaccine-preventable diseases, associated deaths, long-term health consequences, and strain such illnesses takes up on the healthcare and public health system – the anti-vaccine movement has additional consequences which are truly expensive.

Maryn McKenna, in her detailed, and disturbing, “The true dollar cost of the anti-vaccine movement” (Wired, 26 March 2019), breaks down the real implications of the anti-vaxxer movement – from the $800,000 price tag on one child’s tetanus treatment to the public health response price tag of $1.6 million in Washington state.

The numbers can grow much bigger still. Researchers at the CDC estimated that handling 107 cases of measles that occurred in 2011 cost state and local health departments between $2.7 million and $5.3 million. In 2014, 42 people came down with the disease after passing through Disneyland at the same time as a never-identified person with measles—and subsequently infected 90 additional people in California, 14 more in other states, and a further 159 people in Canada. The cost of controlling the outbreak, just in California, totaled almost $4 million. And in 2017, a five-month outbreak of measles in Minnesota infected 79 people and cost the state $2.3 million.

The funding to support that work isn’t being conjured out of the air. It’s coming from the budgets of public agencies, which have already been facing years of cuts and have no secret stashes of discretionary money to spend.

McKenna adds:

But we can quantify the medical and public health response. It is the bottom lines on hospital bills, for medical care that would not otherwise have been necessary. (In the tetanus case, the hospital has declined to say whether the parents or their insurance will pay, or whether the hospital will eat the cost as charity care.) It’s lab work that was never budgeted for, hotel charges and gas for investigators sent out on the road, overtime hours for state police rushing emergency doses of immunotherapy across the state.

Those costs are being paid by state governments, and by federal agencies such as the CDC that give states grants and loan them personnel. State and federal budgets are public money—which means those necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us. The toll of illness may be confined to individuals, but the cost of responding to outbreaks related to vaccine refusal is a bill that we are all being compelled to pay.