[flufluflufluffy]

Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.

[somenameforme]

The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year. And these people are vectors for basically everything and are numerically very large. And you're inevitably going to bump into and interact with these people. So I think the idea of domestic herd immunity is increasingly nonsensical because 'domestic' is no longer even remotely close to a closed system. And global herd immunity is nonsensical simply because it's wholly unrealistic, and at that sort of scale any small issue can explode into a huge one: see - source of most modern cases of polio.

[GJim]

> The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year

American exceptionalism at its finest!

You do realise the vast majority of those "tourists, business travelers, and migrants" are all fully vaccinated?

[somenameforme]

One reason the idea of eliminating COVID was nonsensical is that it's carried by many animals, like all coronaviruses, and can be transmitted from humans to animals and vice versa. Measles, by contrast, is thought to be human only. So anytime there is an outbreak it's not from an unknowable cause. It's going to be either from a foreigner or somebody who visited a foreign country and returned with the virus.

Various social decisions have led to countries you might think of as measles free, no longer being measles free. For instance Canada, the UK, Spain, and obviously Mexico are all now considered to have endemic measles, with Canada and Mexico already compromising the majority of visitors and "visitors" to the US. And the vaccines are not complete immunization. Double dose measles is around 97% effective, meaning you can expect at least 3% breakthrough infections, possibly more depending on factors such as age, immuno compromisation, degree of exposure, and so on.