Vaccinators

Chelsea

I don’t remember my first vaccine shots, but I definitely remember my kids’: They each got a hepatitis B vaccine at birth and have stayed on the vaccine schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control. Over the last couple of years, Charlotte and I have gotten our flu shots together while Marc and Aidan have gotten theirs at the same time. It’s a tradition we plan on continuing, with the support of the wonderful doctors and nurses at our pediatrician’s office—and one we don’t take for granted.

Around the world, doctors, nurses, and dedicated vaccine workers do the lifesaving but often dangerous work of vaccinating kids and adults alike. In many countries, that work is done primarily by women, often in dangerous circumstances. Vaccine workers have been prevented from entering communities and even murdered on the job. Nine polio vaccine workers, all women, were executed in Nigeria in 2013. More than a hundred vaccine workers, almost all women, were killed around the world from 2013 to 2017. A mother-and-daughter polio vaccination team was killed in Pakistan in 2018. And amid an ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, eighty-five health workers, many racing to give the new Ebola vaccine, were killed or wounded in the first five months of 2019.

“Denying children lifesaving vaccinations violates the most fundamental principles of morality, disregards the core tenets of human decency, and breaks the contract of ethical responsibility between generations. Everyone has the chance to do the right thing.”

—DR. CLAIRE POMEROY, PRESIDENT OF THE ALBERT AND MARY LASKER FOUNDATION

In much of the world, “routine vaccinations” are anything but. While most kids have been vaccinated against at least one disease, many others still go without vaccinations for deadly but preventable diseases, like pneumonia, which kills hundreds of thousands of kids under two every year. In some areas, people are afraid that vaccines cause sterilization (they don’t). In others, people are concerned about outsiders coming into their community, including health workers. In many places, there simply aren’t enough shots, enough health workers, or sufficient systems to vaccinate every person. In Pakistan, which has had seventeen cases of polio paralysis in the first five months of 2019, vaccinators are confronting rumors as well as fake fear-mongering videos that have been covered on national television, and public suspicion. One worker trying to persuade a family to vaccinate was shot and killed by an eighteen-year-old family member.

In the U.S., as well as much of Europe and Australia, we face growing challenges of our own. Some parents don’t think the benefits of vaccinations outweigh concerns about vaccine safety; some don’t believe in or know the benefits of vaccinations; some have religious or cultural concerns; some worry about the pain of the shots; some believe pharmaceutical companies push vaccines only to make a profit and not for their kids’ health. For some parents, it’s probably a mix of all of the above. In countries with high levels of vaccine skepticism, many of the nurses, doctors, and public health workers debunking misinformation and talking about the benefits of vaccines are women.

Women have also been in the vanguard of vaccine research. In the 1940s, the work of Drs. Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering led to the first vaccine for pertussis, or whooping cough. Later, they combined that vaccine with diphtheria and tetanus, creating the DTP shot that’s still administered today. In the 1970s, Dr. Ruth Bishop led the research team that first identified rotavirus, the leading cause of severe diarrhea in infants and young kids, which can be deadly because of the severe dehydration it can trigger. It’s also very common: Most kids around the world will be infected with rotavirus before they’re old enough to go to kindergarten. I wasn’t vaccinated against rotavirus, since the first vaccine against it wasn’t approved for use in the U.S. until I was already in college. I’m grateful my kids have been vaccinated against rotavirus—and even more grateful that millions of kids who live in places without reliable access to clean, safe water have been vaccinated.

HILLARY

From local to global efforts, women have also led public campaigns in favor of vaccines. Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter has been a strong advocate on behalf of immunizations for more than thirty-five years, going back to her time as first lady of the state of Georgia. She still serves on the board of Vaccinate Your Family.

We know that it’s possible to eliminate diseases because it’s happened in the last few decades. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox officially defeated. We are closer than ever to beating polio, thanks to the extraordinary efforts coordinated by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative over the last three decades: More than 20 million vaccine workers have immunized more than 2.5 billion children. A growing body of research shows that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is reducing rates of cervical cancer—a promising step forward in a disease that affects more than half a million women worldwide every year.

These gains are possible only when people actually take advantage of the vaccines available to them. In 2000, the CDC declared the U.S. on track to be measles-free. As of early June 2019, more than a thousand recent cases prove that prediction to have been optimistic. Many parents continue to refuse the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine specifically because of concerns that it can cause autism, even though multiple studies have shown that vaccines are safe and don’t cause autism—rather, as one of my favorite sayings goes, “Vaccines cause adults.” Vaccines are important because they help protect on an individual level, and because they create “herd” immunity, the level of vaccination coverage required to help prevent a disease from spreading, and to protect those who can’t be fully vaccinated or aren’t yet—including babies who are too young to receive most vaccines or patients who are immunocompromised. Again, many of the people in the United States who patiently demystify vaccines to parents and explain concepts like herd immunity are women—from pediatricians to nurses to public health workers who are working to put us back on track to eliminate measles and other diseases.

Despite the challenges and even deadly threats, polio eradication campaigns, pneumococcal vaccine campaigns, rotavirus vaccine campaigns, and other inoculation efforts haven’t stopped. Every year, more and more children are vaccinated against more and more diseases. None of that would be possible without the heroism of the women who work tirelessly around the world to protect kids from getting sick, even when that means putting their own health and lives at risk.