(Tom: The major point the author does not raise is that I have read people who contracted measles have a lower cancer rate than people who received the vaccine.)
A note to readers: This is a technical document written primarily for a scientific and medical audience. It examines the underlying studies, immunology, epidemiology, and limitations of the available evidence in considerable detail. For readers who do not need that level of detail, this summary contains the central argument and conclusions and may be all that is necessary to read.
Every American now over the age of sixty-nine was almost certainly infected with wild measles as a child. Every American under fifty-eight was born into the era of further-attenuated measles vaccination and has probably never been infected with the wild virus. The boundary between those two populations is currently passing through the seventh decade of life.
The consequence is that measles in the elderly has never been observed in a substantial population whose immunity derives primarily from childhood vaccination, because until now no such elderly population has existed. Before vaccination, the question could not be studied either, since nearly everyone was infected by adolescence. We therefore have almost no direct evidence of what measles susceptibility, disease severity, or mortality will look like when vaccine-derived immunity reaches old age.
There are already reasons to ask what happens as vaccine-derived immunity ages along with the immune systems of the people who carry it. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that, in elimination settings, measles antibody levels decline after vaccination but do not show the same pattern after natural infection. For decades, that decline may have been partly obscured by subclinical boosting when vaccinated people encountered circulating wild virus without developing clinical measles. Elimination largely removed that source of exposure.
Measles itself raises a second question. Infection can erase a substantial portion of the pre-existing antibody repertoire, a phenomenon known as immune amnesia. In the principal study, children lost between 11 and 73 percent of their pre-existing antibody repertoire following infection. That work was conducted in children, whose accumulated immune histories were relatively short and whose capacity to rebuild immune responses was greater than it is in old age. What immune amnesia for other diseases after a measles infection would mean in a seventy- or eighty-year-old with a lifetime of accumulated immunity has not been studied.
There is another major uncertainty. The serological threshold commonly used to define measles protection rests on remarkably limited evidence, beginning with a 1990 study in which only nine people had pre-exposure titers at or below the proposed threshold. A subsequent systematic review found the evidence supporting that threshold to be scant and concluded that it requires further characterization.
There is another major issue. The serological threshold used to define measles immunity is based on nine people studied in 1990, and the field has formally acknowledged that it needs to be recharacterized. None of this predicts a catastrophe. It identifies a gap that becomes measurable around 2033, when the first single-dose cohorts reach sixty-five, and around 2054 for the two-dose cohorts. We do not have to wait that long to begin finding out what happens to vaccine-derived measles immunity as people age. That research is not currently being done.
Public health officials and scientists have assumed that childhood measles vaccination provides protection throughout the human lifespan, even though no fully vaccinated generation has yet reached old age. Once again, an assumption has hardened into an article of faith without the evidence needed to support it.
You can read the full article here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rwmalonemd/p/measles-immunity-no-twice-vaccinated
