As the annual flu season approaches, Americans can either listen to the politicians or the physicians when it comes to deciding whether to get themselves and their children vaccinated against a disease that kills tens of thousands of people in this country every year.
Our strong advice: Ignore the politicians. Listen to the physicians.
Recently, the association of Mississippi pediatricians lent its support to the vaccination recommendations provided by a national coalition of major medical groups – The American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. To ward off the flu and other communicable diseases that tend to spread during the fall and winter, the recommendations are:
- Annual flu vaccines for adults and children 6 months and older.
- One-time antibody shots for newborns for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), as well as RSV vaccines for adults 75 and older and those with compromised immune systems.
- Annual COVID-19 vaccines for adults 19 and older, especially those who are at an increased risk for severe disease.
Normally, these recommendations from medical organizations would be an unnecessary duplication of federal guidelines. But given the missing or medically unsound guidance from the Trump administration, the physicians felt compelled to speak out in a unified voice.
They are hoping to counter the unscientific advice coming from Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and from Donald Trump himself. The anti-vaccination tenor of this administration has contributed to the resurgence of diseases, most notably measles, that the nation had almost eradicated.
Mississippi, once the poster child for vaccination acceptance, has backslid, although not as badly as other parts of the country. It remains one of only 10 states with kindergarten vaccination rates for measles above 95%, which is considered the threshold necessary to prevent outbreaks of the highly contagious virus.
The state average, though, is not the complete picture. There are eight counties now in Mississippi where the measles vaccine rate for kindergartners has fallen below 95%. These counties could become the locus for a measles outbreak, which, once established, could spread beyond county lines and endanger anyone who is too young to be vaccinated or who can’t receive the vaccine due to other medical conditions.
So far, thankfully, there have been only a handful of deaths from measles the past two years in the U.S. It should be noted, however, that for the decade prior to that, there were zero. Nor is death the only bad outcome from contracting measles. Survivors can be left with permanent hearing or vision loss, brain or lung damage, or a persistently weakened immune system.
In sum, the best way to protect the health of yourself, your children and others is to heed the doctors’ advice: Get the shots.
