Save Our Kids, Stop The Anti-Vaxxers

Lessons from abroad: Trust in immunizations is dangerously low in Europe, and it’s wreaked havoc on public health.

- Lisa Fitterman

IT WAS A DAMP FRIDAY NIGHT IN FEBRUARY, AND the end of a long work week. Nicole Gommers finished tucking her happy, gurgling eight-month-old baby, Micha, into his crib, and then put his older brother to bed. Then her mobile phone rang.

“Nicole, I have bad news,” said a familiar voice. It was the manager of the daycare both boys attended around the corner from the family’s apartment in The Hague. An older girl who attended the daycare’s after-school program and wasn’t vaccinated against measles had come down with the disease. Now parents of children who may have been exposed were being called.

“It’s not Ben,” the day care manager said. “It’s Micha you have to watch out for.” Micha? But he was in the daycare’s baby section, off limits to older children because the infants were still too young to be vaccinated. It appeared the infected girl had brought the babies a toy. The measles virus can survive in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours.

The Netherlands was in the middle of a long measles outbreak that had begun the previous May in the country’s ‘Bible Belt,’ communities of ultra-conservative Calvinist Protestants that stretch from Zeeland in the south to the province of Overijssel in the central northeast. Eventually, it would spread as far as British Columbia, 7,500 kilometres away, when a tourist exposed to the virus flew home. But surely, Nicole thought, surely Micha would be spared.