Measles kills roughly 1 in 1,000 cases. Mostly unvaccinated kids. (Also cancer patients and pregnant people).
109 countries
(plus many more territories, regions, and states)
require childhood #vaccination.
NZ does not.
🧵
@nzherald @NZStuff
NZ does quite badly on childhood immunisations, even compared to many lower-income countries.
Australia, by comparison, has very high childhood vaccination rates.
94% of children age 5 are protected.
It's only 80% in NZ.
You need 92-94% to achieve herd immunity to measles.
They've protected their vulnerable patients. And their kids.
We, however, will face outbreaks.
109 nations across the world have compulsory childhood vaccinations.
It's a policy choice that reduces unnecessary death and disability across much of South-, Central- and North- America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
In NZ, 33% of 18-month-olds are not fully vaccinated.
109 countries require children to be# immunised, to prevent death and disability from vaccine preventable diseases like measles, pertussis, polio, and diphtheria.
Not NZ.
#nzpol
In fact, in many parts of New Zealand, our rates of childhood coverage are downright abysmal.
As low, or lower than, the childhood vaccination rates of many impoverished nations.
It's not rocket science. We could do better in protecting New Zealanders' public health.
But it seems like we're moving backwards.
Waiting for the next measles or polio outbreak...
inevitable because our vaccination rates are so low.
then closing down schools out of panic.
Measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and polio outbreaks are pretty much inevitable when you have vaccination rates as low as ours are in New Zealand.
And if you drill down deeper, you'll see almost unimaginable regional (mostly poverty related) differences in childhood vaccination rates.
Rates as low as 49% in some poor rural areas.
Truly third-world levels of protection...
... compared with Aboriginal Australian childhood (5-yr-olds) vaccination rates of 96%.
rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-k…
We can do better.
TBH, as a wealthy country, it's not likely we could do much worse.
Requiring childhood vaccinations is an option that's used by 109 other countries.
Unvaccinated kids, repeated outbreaks, and school closures is not a healthy response to an ongoing problem.
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