“CDC panel recommends multiple shots for measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox instead of a single vaccine… Experts react with concern that increasing the number of vaccinations required will threaten children’s health.” — The Guardian
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At long last, our government is taking a strong anti-coddling stance on vaccines, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Younger generations of namby-pamby participation-trophy screen addicts need the kind of toughening experience I faced in the good old days of my youth.
To be clear, when I say “the good old days,” I mean “the Nixon era.” When I say “my youth,” I mean “when I weighed less than a golf ball and had a tail.” And when I say “toughening experience,” I mean “first-trimester prenatal rubella.”
Measles and mumps have been in the news a lot recently. This is fantastic, of course. For too long, parents have been deprived of the excitement of watching their babies play roulette with measles-induced encephalitis. And it’s high time that we went back to the long-held tradition of challenging our kids with the kind of raging temperatures and massively swollen faces that only mumps can offer. But amid all the fever-induced euphoria, some of you seem to be forgetting that when you eschew vaccinations, there’s more to MMRs than just M&Ms.
Look, I understand why folks undervalue rubella. With measles, you get the drama, visual appeal, and bragging rights of a full-body raised blotchy rash. Mumps even offers an exhilarating risk of massively swollen and permanently damaged testicles. While rubella offers only low-grade fever, slight tiredness, runny nose, and mild rash… and 25 to 50 percent of cases have no symptoms at all. Boring. Plus, rubella confuses everyone by having two names. “German measles” is misleading because the symptoms are barely Teutonic at all, unless you consider that being pale and blond is great for showcasing a rash that might otherwise be totally disregarded.
But rubella really brings its A-game when it comes to producing lifelong effects in utero. Not only is the incident rate for congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) impressive—about 85 percent, if the mother contracts the virus in the first twelve weeks—it also comes with a dazzling array of symptoms. Deafness occurs in more than half of all cases. Vision loss and heart defects are each roughly fifty-fifty. And as an added bonus, learning disabilities and other systemic problems are also common.
Measles and mumps are a fond childhood memory for boomers—who have claimed a bit of a monopoly on nostalgia—whereas rubella was just hitting its stride when my generation arrived. The virus has been around since at least the early 1800s, but it didn’t flare up into a massive global outbreak until the mid-1960s. For a couple of halcyon years, we baby Gen Xers achieved as many as ten thousand cases of CRS per year in the US—and that’s not counting all the miscarriages. But vaccine mandates took hold almost immediately. A rubella vaccine was created in 1969, and the MMR vaccine was broadly introduced in 1971, the year of my gestation. I almost missed my chance. The incidents of CRS in the US quickly dropped to fewer than five cases per year—all from overseas. For decades, we’ve had no real American homegrown CRS at all.
I’ll admit that my own CRS is less impressive than it might be. In fact, it’s only “suspected” because my hearing and heart are… ordinary. But I do have a super-obvious congenital cataract with associated malformation of the retina and iris—plus micropthalmus. My right eye is smaller than my left, and has been totally blind since birth.
This defect may be minor, but it made a big impression on my parents back in 1972. Excitement! What’s up with our baby’s weird eye? The doctors were like, “Yeah, this is probably the result of that illness that you caught eight months ago from your older kid, and thought was just a cold or whatever. Watch for massive cognitive delays. Good luck?”
So much dramatic tension. So many opportunities for guilt and uncertainty. Would I toddle into the furniture on my blind side? Would I ever learn to spell “micropthalmus”? Would my questionable mental acuity become a fond family joke by the time Mom and Dad sent me off to college eighteen years later?
Of course it would.
Unless, of course, it hadn’t.
This is what made parenting so much more interesting in the good old days (which totally includes Gen X, whatever the boomers say). You young folks—millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and whatever the heck comes after that—have no idea how much fun you’ve been missing.
Now, though, you may get the chance to find out.
