Latest news with #herdImmunity
CTV News
09-07-2025
- Health
- CTV News
Vaccination rates among children in Maritimes are too low to stop spread of measles
A dose of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination awaits the next patient during a vaccine clinic at Southwestern Public Health in St. Thomas, Ont. on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Geoff Robins FREDERICTON — At least three out of the four Atlantic provinces have released data revealing their measles vaccination rates in children are below levels recommended by scientists to prevent the disease from spreading. In Nova Scotia, the provincial government told The Canadian Press that about 23 per cent of children were not fully vaccinated for measles in 2024. Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick say about 10 per cent of children were not fully vaccinated for the disease. Newfoundland and Labrador did not respond to requests for information on vaccination rates for measles. Janna Shapiro is a post-doctoral fellow in immunology at the University of Toronto. She says communities need to vaccinate at least 95 per cent of their population to achieve a level of herd immunity, which stops the disease from spreading. This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 9, 2025.
The Guardian
29-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
As a visibly physically disabled MP, my view on the welfare bill is clear: we need a reset and fast
In March 2020, when the Conservative government looked like an outlier in appearing to pursue a Covid strategy centring on herd immunity, for the first time in my life I felt raw, hot fear. Thinking of my toddler and what might happen if I caught coronavirus and was treated under the then Nice guidelines 'frailty' score was too much. I sobbed deeply. After 10 years of austerity, I knew then that disabled people would pay an enormous price for the pandemic thanks to the government's handling of it. Disabled people did: almost 60% of Covid-related deaths involved disabled people in that first wave. I vowed then that I would do all I could to use my skills and experiences of 20 years working in disability law and policy to deliver a country that treats disabled people with dignity and respect. Five years later, I am one of the only visibly physically disabled members of parliament. I was proud to be elected last year as the first person to have grown up in my constituency to go on to represent it in parliament for more than a century. I am proud, too, that Labour's manifesto committed to championing the rights of disabled people, and to the principle of working with disabled people to ensure our views and voices are at the heart of all we do. Consequently, since April, I have been engaging relentlessly with government, at the very highest level, to change its proposals as set out in the universal credit and personal independence payment bill. I made it clear from the start I could not support the proposals on personal independence payments (Pip). Pip is an in-work benefit, designed to ensure disabled people can live independently. There are 4 million disabled people in poverty in the UK. As a matter of conscience, I could not support measures that would push 250,000 disabled people, including 50,000 children, into poverty. Nor could I accept proposals that used a points system, under current descriptors, that would exclude eligibility for those who cannot put on their underwear, prosthetic limbs or shoes without support. The concessions now announced are significant, including that all recipients of Pip who currently receive it will continue to do so. I know this will be an enormous relief for many of my nearly 6,000 constituents in receipt of Pip and for disabled people across the country. However, I will continue working, as I have done from the beginning, to look at these concessions carefully against the evidence on the impact upon disabled people, including my constituents, and disabled people's organisations. Fundamentally, I will be looking for further reassurances that the detail will fulfil Labour's manifesto commitments to disabled people. The social model of disability must be central to this – removing barriers to our inclusion in society. Proposals must take a mission-led approach across all five missions to break down barriers to opportunity for disabled people. I hope to see three things from government, embedded in the text of the amendments, if the bill reaches the report stage. First, the review being led by Stephen Timms, the minister for social security and disability, must not be performative. The government must not make the same mistake twice. I strongly recommend bringing in a disabled expert on equality and employment law, such as Prof Anna Lawson at the University of Leeds, to support this work. Second, the government must consult disabled people over the summer to understand the impact of the proposed changes from November 2026 on future claimants. These must mitigate risks of discrimination for those current recipients with similar disabilities and against pushing new disabled claimants into poverty after November 2026. In doing so, it must produce an impact assessment that also reflects the impact of unmet need for future recipients on health and social care services, and clarifies the application of new criteria on those receiving Pip if they get reassessed. Third, growth must mean inclusive growth. In implementing the £1bn employment, health and skills support programme, there needs to be a clear target for closing the disability employment gap. Importantly, there needs to be a commitment to a sector-by-sector strategy on closing this gap and a skills training strategy for the employment support workers enabling disabled people into work. These approaches outperform cuts or sanctions in getting disabled people into sustainable employment. This matters. The Conservatives left us with a pitiful 29% employment gap and 17% pay gap for disabled people. The Labour government has an opportunity to bring in a new era of policymaking for disabled people that takes a laser focus in closing this gap. The disability sector believes that this can be reduced by 14%; generating £17.2bn for the exchequer. We must seize this moment to do things differently and move beyond the damaging rhetoric and disagreements of recent weeks. In line with the prime minister's statement that reform should be implemented with Labour values of fairness, a reset requires a shift of emphasis to enabling disabled people to fulfil their potential. I will continue to engage with government and disabled people's organisations, to fight for a country that treats disabled people with dignity and respect. Marie Tidball is Labour MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on autism and co-chair of the disability parliamentary Labour party Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Medscape
27-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Without Measles Herd Immunity, Vulnerable Kids Are at Risk
Summary In this segment, Dr Jacobson discusses the importance of vaccine efficacy in controlling measles outbreaks. The measles vaccine is 97% effective, meaning a small percentage of individuals do not develop immunity. Herd immunity protects these individuals by limiting the virus's ability to spread. Dropping vaccination rates, now at 92% for kindergarteners, leaves those who do not respond to the vaccine at increased risk. Dr Offit references a 1999 measles outbreak in the Netherlands, where vaccinated individuals in largely unvaccinated communities faced greater risk than unvaccinated individuals in communities with high vaccination coverage. Key Takeaways: The vaccine is 97% effective, leaving a small portion of individuals without immunity. Community-level vaccination rates matter: Exposure risk increases even for vaccinated individuals in areas with low overall coverage. Herd immunity creates protective 'halos' around those who are vulnerable, highlighting the need to maintain high immunization rates. To View Entire Event Recording: WATCH NOW - Measles Resurgence: What Physicians Must Know Now
CNN
09-06-2025
- Health
- CNN
NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
FacebookTweetLink Follow In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'
CNN
09-06-2025
- Health
- CNN
NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'
