Comment: There’s no vaccine that assures concern for community

Published 1:30 am Thursday, July 17, 2025

By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post

The simplified, somewhat apocryphal story I was taught about the origins of vaccines is this one: In 1796, at the height of the smallpox epidemic, physician Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a related but milder illness, appeared to be immune to the more severe disease, which killed 30 percent of the people who caught it. Jenner took a cowpox sample from an infected milkmaid and injected it into the arm of a willing subject, and the subject became immune, and smallpox became eradicated, and we never looked back.

What I didn’t learn until recently is that the subject was an 8-year-old boy. His name was James Phipps, and he was the son of Jenner’s gardener. Only a small amount is known about Phipps’s life, pre- or postvaccination, but can you imagine what it would have felt like to be his parents? To volunteer your son for a new procedure, which at the time must have sounded like, “Good morrow, I would like to slice open your son’s arm and shoot in some pus. The pus is infected!”

Two centuries later, it’s hard to know how much their volunteering was the spirit of altruism vs. the reality of financial dependence — we’ve got some real issues of ethics and classism wrapped up in this medical tale — but it’s probably safe to say that their fear of smallpox outweighed their fear of the unknown. And so, a few days ago, when I held my 4-year-old daughter in my lap as a nurse prepared her annual boosters, I found myself thanking the Phipps family for how much they had been willing to risk so that we could risk barely anything at all.

One of my daughter’s boosters was the MMRV vaccine, the one preventing measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox. She got the shot and a bandage; her most serious side effect was missing pool day with her preschool class. And then I woke up the next morning and saw a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that measles cases had reached their highest level in 33 years.

There have been 1,288 confirmed cases so far this year; the last time numbers were this high was in 1992. Measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000, but the rate of kindergarten vaccination — the round of shots my daughter was getting — has been falling for years. It is at 92.7 percent, a few percentage points below the 95 percent that the CDC deems necessary to protect a community from an outbreak.

So now we are looking back. Or blindfolding ourselves, maybe, because unlike in 1796, we now should know that vaccines are safe and effective. It’s not Dr. Jenner saying, I can shoot your son with pus, it’s Dr. Jenner saying I can safely and effectively keep your son healthy, and parents are saying, I choose door Number Measles.

I have struggled with a long time over how to write about this subject without turning my column into another tedious rehashing of the “evidence” that vaccines cause autism or another earnest collection of quotes from public health officials detailing how scared they are or another tragic, infuriating profile of a modern child who died of measles. (There is no evidence; they are very scared; Daisy Hildebrand was 8 and unvaccinated when she died in April. Her father told an interviewer that, no, he didn’t regret her vaccine status, and no, he had no plans to vaccinate his other children.)

I even got lost in reading a scientific study about how to engage in “empathetic engagement” with “vaccine hesitant” people on social media. Researchers have learned that the best way to change minds on the topic is by responding with sympathy and gentleness to “build trust.” Which is all well and good, if you can grit your teeth through it, because how long is the trust-building phase of this inoculation project going to take? Thomas Jefferson ordered inoculations at Monticello! Elvis got the polio vaccine on TV!

And yet, here we are in 2025 with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. firing all 17 sitting members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing them with a new, smaller group, several of whose members who have expressed skepticism about vaccines or vaccine policy. And let me tell you, when you have spent your adult life saying let’s see what the CDC recommends but now the CDC might be infiltrated with ding-dongs, it’s hard to know what your next move is.

The trouble with talking about vaccines is that we are never really talking about the science. We’re talking about whom we trust and why, how we learn what is true, and what we owe one another. We are talking about what it feels like to want nothing more than to raise your children well and to, as a result, spend at least half the time convinced you are screwing them up.

Promise me I’ll never have to get another shot again, my daughter demanded, and I told her sorry, but the shots keep you from getting sick, and she said, I like getting sick because I get to watch movies, and I said, no, a very bad sick, and she said, what kind of bad sick? And inwardly I thought, I will do everything in my power to make sure you do not experience the bad sick, and outwardly I just tried to think of the worst pain she had ever experienced so that she could understand something tangible. Like when you got that splinter on the porch and it bled a lot, I told her, thinking about how her hair is the same color as Daisy Hildebrand’s. Like that.

When I hear that herd immunity is going down, what makes me worry most isn’t the fear that I will get sick. I’m fully vaccinated and boosted, and, now, so is my daughter. What makes me worry more is that there are other people in my life — vulnerable infants, immunocompromised elderly folks — who aren’t able to be vaccinated, and they rely on others to protect them.

And what makes me worry most is that the people causing the collapse in herd immunity do not seem to understand that. They don’t see the world that way. They don’t understand that this isn’t a “my body, my choice” situation, that this is a situation in which the injection I get in my body is for me and also for everyone I might come near. They don’t seem to understand they are part of a herd. A herd that depends on us doing the right thing by people we never meet. They either don’t understand that or they don’t care. That’s what makes me really worry. And there’s not a vaccine for that.

James Phipps. It would have been terrifying enough to watch your son be injected with cowpox, but to make sure the vaccine worked, Jenner then had to inject him with actual smallpox, which, as previously stated, killed 3 out of 10 infected patients. He injected Phipps again and again, more than 20 times. Phipps never caught the disease. Eventually, when he grew up, Jenner gave him a cottage, and you can visit it in Gloucestershire, England. I keep thinking of how much blind faith in science it would have required to be James Phipps, rolling up your sleeve again and again and again. And how little is required of us. And how too many of us are losing what little we had.

Monica Hesse is a Washington Post opinion columnist.