BY DAVID ZEIGLER

As a biologist with a general understanding of vaccines and our immune systems’ interaction with them, I have been both amazed and troubled by the recent nonsense put out by the anti-vaccine “community” who have such false notions of vaccines— especially as concerns their safety and efficacy, which has led to a rise in so-called “vaccine hesitancy.”

As a child in the 1950s I contracted both the mumps and the measles since those vaccines were not available at that time. I survived both of these viruses relatively unscathed, but I remember feeling miserable as they ran their course. Having these diseases was my “vaccination” against both, and I have been immune to them ever since. I may have had “booster” exposures (without knowing it) to these diseases later on by being exposed to others who had those diseases.

Today most children are immunized early on against measles, mumps, and several other diseases and so never have to suffer their symptoms and threats. I have known a few people who survived polio, a much more serious threat. I had my polio vaccine when I was in middle school back in the 1960s (in the sugar pill) along with my smallpox vaccine. Today those deadly diseases are almost unheard of in the developed world—all thanks to effective vaccines against those diseases. The number of people who have been saved from death and suffering from these diseases numbers in the hundreds of millions, billions cumulatively.