Talk to Patients About: Community Immunity
By Sean Price Texas Medicine January 2020

 Herd immunity – also known as community immunity − is simple: Vaccines protect the people who get them but also anyone those people are near – even those with no immunity – because the illness can’t spread. 

Yet many patients do not grasp this important concept, says Austin pediatrician Ari Brown, MD.

“It needs to be explained,” she said. “I don’t think it’s intuitive.”

In fact, patients’ failure to understand community immunity can endanger this important protection, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey. Americans who do not correctly recognize the definition of the term are less likely to understand the benefits of vaccines, the survey found.

Thanks to community immunity, many people who deliberately refuse shots get a free ride on the protection that other people’s vaccinations provide, Dr. Brown says. But such refusals can create vaccine-free “hotspots” that in turn lead to disease outbreaks – like the 2019 measles outbreaks that hit the U.S., including Texas. 

Hotspots are a problem in Texas because it is one of 18 states that allows parents to refuse mandatory school vaccinations for reasons of conscience. (For the latest district-by-district exemption statistics, see www.texmed.org/YourSchool.)

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  Tex Med. 2020;116(1):46 
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Last Updated On

January 09, 2020

Originally Published On

December 20, 2019

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