Zeke Emanuel: We’re Going to See More Children, Unfortunately, Die Because of These Outbreaks Due to Low Measles Vaccination Rate

EXCERPT:

EMANUEL: "Well, so, what happens is you have one infected child coming into a preschool with 30 or 40 other kids. The measles, you know, goes into the air, hangs out there, will infect a lot of other kids. They’ll come down with illness. Some of them will get seriously ill and require hospitalization. And if you have a 70% immunization rate, there are a lot of kids in that room that are going to get sick, and then they’re going to bring it home and their parents might not be fully immunized anymore, their brothers and sisters might not be immunized because the parents have changed their philosophy. This is how it spreads. And then we’ve seen recently, you know, people getting on airplanes, getting on trains, going into crowded airports and crowded train stations and spreading this illness. These are — again, we have — there’s a good reason we have all these vaccines, because parents really stopped worrying in the 50s, 60s and 70s of all these infectious diseases. I don’t think Trump really understands how much parents feared polio, and they lined up their children to get polio vaccines because they were worried every summer they might get paralyzed, they might get on an iron lung. People really, really -- you know, we’ve become so complacent because we never — we haven’t seen measles outbreaks. And every so often, there’s a big outbreak of some infectious disease, and then people get reminded of why we have these very valuable vaccines. And children die, as we’ve seen in Texas, and we’re going to see more children, unfortunately, die because of these outbreaks."