I’ve read that too. But, I recently had to point out to a completely anti-vaccine friend that vaccines do wear off. She posted on Facebook an article where, if I remember right, in Illinois there had been an outbreak of pertussis at one of the local high schools and it was confirmed that all the kids that got it had been vaccinated for pertussis as babies. So it was a big deal because it was proving that vaccines don’t work, blah blah blah. But it is known that that vaccine does lose effectiveness, it’s not that it doesn’t work. So it seems to be pretty common that, at least with that particular disease, that people do become susceptible to it and can help it spread.
As I’ve said a couple of times, I’m somewhere in the middle on vaccines. I think in general they’re safe, but I don’t think they’re safe for everyone. And if a parent doesn’t want to vaccinate their kid, then they shouldn’t, whether I think their reasons are reasonable or not. There are enough people that vaccinate that there should be an extremely minor affect on society as a whole. Most of the comments here have been of the all or nothing sort and I just can’t stand it. Conservatives are all about individual choice and individual responsibility, except when it comes to this?
In reading that article, I found no mention made of whether those children had received the vaccine as an infant. All I found was an assessment of whether they had received the booster as per the (then) new recommendation. What I also saw in that article was that, during the full epidemic, only 36 people out of nearly 5000 students and faculty at that school developed pertussis, suggesting that a large number of people were still very effectively protected through their infant vaccinations. It is possible that those 36 never, in fact, had the vaccine. Another possibility is that they had been previously vaccinated, and the disease was milder as a result.