Between 1962 and 1964, the world went through a pandemic much different from the current COVID-19 pandemic. Rubivirus caused that pandemic, the virus that causes According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, . CDC also states, “11,000 pregnant women lost their babies, 2,100 newborns died, and 20,000 babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS).” Congenital rubella syndrome causes a myriad of abnormalities in the developing fetus, often leading to a miscarriage. Children born with the infection can expect a lifetime of disability, and that lifetime is likely to be shorter than a child born without the infection.
The rubella vaccine would not be licensed in the United States until 1969. As a result, the only prevention measures were things we use today with COVID-19: social distancing, quarantine, isolation, and contact tracing. :
“Those of us who were practicing pediatrics or obstetrics during those years remember with poignancy the many tragedies we witnessed as families struggled with decisions about therapeutic abortions and severely damaged infants. In Philadelphia, I calculated that at the height of the epidemic 1% of all births were affected.”
Dr. Plotkin and colleagues developed the rubella vaccine, which would be licensed in 1969, and then combined with the mumps and measles vaccines in 1971. Since its inception, the rubella vaccine has prevented millions of cases. In preventing rubella infection, the vaccine also prevented pregnant women from acquiring the infection and passing it to the developing fetus. In essence, the vaccine likely prevented many miscarriages and abortions.
The virus that causes rubella has no known hosts other than humans. The vaccine is highly effective at preventing infection and disease. These two factors alone make rubella a candidate for eradication, much like smallpox. The only thing standing in the way is wide-scale adoption of the vaccine.
As we have seen in recent years, especially with the vaccines against the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy is high. Vaccine hesitancy is also growing in developing nations, . The World Health Organization if interventions are not put into place soon and globally.
*******************************************
Thank you for reading! If you like what we researched for you and presented in this blog post, and would like to read more blog posts like this, please consider signing up for email updates by