Last Friday, the Student Health Center sent emails to unvaccinated students on Georgetown’s campus reminding them of the mandatory vaccination requirement. The email appeared amidst a revival of the vaccination debate across the United States owing to an outbreak of measles in California earlier this year.
“Measles is now showing up in many other states,” Director of the Student Health Center Dr. James Marsh wrote in an email to the Voice. “It is not clear whether all those cases are related to the original outbreak in California.”
This outbreak has again sparked the debate about whether parents should be allowed to exempt their children from vaccinations because, according to Marsh, such outbreaks can “pose serious risks to unvaccinated or immunocompromised individuals.”
According to Dr. Christopher Loffredo, professor of oncology and biostatistics and an internationally known researcher in cancer epidemiology, parents were not as concerned about vaccines until 1998 when a report was published in a prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, linking autism in children to receiving the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. That report is now completely discredited upon an investigation that found the author had falsified the data, and the report was withdrawn by the journal.
It took about a decade for the investigation’s findings to be made public and, according to Loffredo, by then the damage had already been done. Many believed the false findings linking vaccines to autism and continue to be suspicious of vaccinating their children, as evidenced by high rates of “personal-belief exemptions” in many states. Numerous territories, including the District of Columbia, allow these exemptions from immunization based on medical reasons or religious beliefs. The California Department of Public Health noted that about 2.5 percent of kindergarteners have these exemptions statewide.
Although the Catholic Church objects to the use of vaccines that are made in descendant cells of aborted fetuses, Dr. Kevin Donovan, Director of Pellegrino Center for Bioethics, does not believe Georgetown’s Catholic identity conflicts with the moral imperative of childhood vaccination.
“Georgetown, being a Jesuit institution, exactly reflects the position of the Catholic Church,” Donovan said. “The Church, following a somewhat different controversy, taught that the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine. Parents have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children, as well as those around them who might be infected by an unvaccinated child. It would take a severe moral conflict to override that obligation.”
According to Donovan, Loffredo, and Marsh, vaccination is particularly important on college campuses due to high population density and the increased risk for infectious diseases to spread rapidly. Measles can spread quickly if the rate of the people vaccinated among a population falls below 90%, a phenomenon known as poor herd immunity.
While some students remain unvaccinated, Marsh was optimistic about immunization rates at Georgetown and said the emails were intended as an extra precaution. “The Student Health Center tracks vaccination rates very carefully and compliance rates among Georgetown students are safely higher than 90 percent,” Marsh said.
