Preventing New Plagues: THA Committed to Defending Time-Tested Vaccines

Typically, policy disagreements we at the Texas Hospital Association have with other advocates involve reasonable minds presenting differing viewpoints with a credible basis. But here and there, it feels like we’re arguing against believers in a flat Earth – situations where we’re in the position of using settled, established science to fight junk science and dubious anecdotal information.

John Hawkins, President/CEO, Texas Hospital Association — Hawkins

Increasingly, that’s the vibe around vaccines. Despite all the illness and death that time-tested immunizations have demonstrably prevented – and the documented memories of what diseases like polio once did to our society – we’ve seen vaccine skepticism and hesitancy persist. Its proponents have made headway both at the federal level and in the new Texas Legislature, where we’re currently navigating another run of bills to weaken vaccine requirements and our providers’ ability to keep health care spaces safe.

For us, these recent trends have only hardened our resolve to protect vaccine requirements, vaccine uptake in Texas and hospital environments in which diseases can be managed and contained. So, too, has the recent news of confirmed Texas measles cases in Gaines and Harris counties. Protecting vaccines isn’t just about our patients – it’s also about protecting our hospital workforce from preventable diseases so they can stay on the front lines, where our communities need them. THA is committed to opposing bills that attempt to weaken requirements to receive childhood vaccines. We’re also still fighting against attempts to take away hospitals’ ability to institute vaccine requirements that are appropriate for their setting and situation, or to encourage Texans to receive exemptions from these vaccines as a matter of convenience.

Several bills we’ve seen filed on this important issue are already giving us heartburn in the early days of this state session. At least one measure attempts to prohibit any provider from refusing a procedure, service or treatment to patients “based on an individual’s vaccination status,” which would threaten to erode the safety of health care facilities across our state. There’s also a resolution attempting to amend the Texas Constitution to recognize a right to refuse any vaccination. Those are just a couple of examples.

But the science on vaccine effectiveness is so established that the data we have are more reminder than revelation. For example, as a Mayo Clinic timeline on the polio vaccine notes, several epidemics of the disease had hit between 1948 and 1955, the year the first polio vaccine was licensed in the U.S. By 1979, the United States had its last endemic case, and in 1994, polio was considered eradicated in both North and South America. In 2022, however, paralytic polio was identified in an unvaccinated young adult in New York, and wastewater testing indicated “community circulation.” It was only the second known instance of transmission of polio in the U.S. since 1979, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

On measles, the success story is similar: Development of a vaccine in the 1960s led to drastic reductions in cases. In the years before the vaccine, according to CDC, there were about 48,000 measles hospitalizations and 400 to 500 deaths per year. By 2000, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. But we’ve seen it reemerge in small but troubling fits and starts linked to under-vaccination – including this recent resurgence in Gaines and Harris counties, our state’s first cases since 2023.

Meanwhile, attacks on vaccine safety and efficacy fail on the merits over and over, like the long-discredited and scientifically retracted notion that immunizations cause autism. But where vaccine deniers lack credibility, they increasingly make up for it with political and on-the-ground momentum. Legislation like the bills I mentioned earlier are reflective of a growing anti-immunization movement evident in Texas’ own numbers: The state’s Annual Report of Immunization Status of Students for the 2023-24 school year showed conscientious exemptions for at least one vaccine were up to 2.32%, the highest percentage in at least the past five years, and a full percent higher than four years earlier. Hesitancy and skepticism over the COVID-19 vaccine over the past four years certainly seem to be driving the same attitudes toward long-standing vaccines that have become a victim of their own success – decades and generations of it. When a disease is out of sight, the reason for that welcome status quo becomes increasingly forgotten – and, it seems, underappreciated.

Rest assured that at THA, our approach to vaccines won’t change, and neither will our deeply held passion for preserving this most basic pillar of the health of our state. When it comes to the public health vitality of immunizations, and their accompanying importance to our member hospitals, history and the truth are on our side. Those are our best weapons to fortify our state against a new plague, and – on this issue above nearly all others – we’ll wield them every chance we get.