Decades ago as an infant I received several doses of the polio vaccine, one of a panel of childhood vaccinations. Mass vaccination had already had a huge impact on the disease by that point, infections and serious consequences had already dropped substantially.
My Favorite Shirt
However there was no Varicella vaccine back then, the virus which causes chicken pox. We now know that Varicella is also responsible for the even more serious Shingles later in life, as the long-dormant virus can become active again.
I remember chicken pox. The thing I remember most about suffering through chicken pox isn't the itching, though that was bad. It isn't the blisters, it isn't the fever. The thing I remember most is that I had been allowed to wear my favorite shirt as a way to comfort me, and that shirt disappeared after I recovered. My parents said they didn't know what happened to it, it had been lost. I was upset about it, and remember the feeling of loss to this day.
It was decades later, after my parents had both passed away, that I realized: they burned the shirt. Chicken pox is so infectious that parents would often dispose of the bedding and clothing afterwards.
My children have little context for this. They never developed chicken pox, and don't know anyone who has. They've never even heard of anyone who developed chicken pox. The infection rate has dropped by 97% since the addition of Varicella to the childhood vaccine schedule in 1995.
In fact, until Covid-19, they didn't have to give much thought to disease at all.
Vaccines work
We're seeing the same rapid reduction in the many cancers which are triggered by the HPV virus. Rates of these cancers are dropping due to the introduction of widespread HPV vaccination a number of years ago.
Vaccines work. They work well at an individual level, but they work even better when a disease cannot gain any hold within a population — the much-discussed herd immunity. In the US we are rapidly losing this herd immunity as antivax sentiment gains strength and more parents decline to vaccinate their children.
We're heading into a world where, for the first time, vaccines won't work as well as they used to.
Booster shots
Several weeks ago I had blood titers run to gauge antibody response from the vaccines of my childhood. My wife and I got booster shots for Measles/Mumps/Rubella (MMR), Whooping Cough (tdap), and Polio, trying to compensate for a weakening herd immunity. This is the sad reality we have to prepare for.