One person can spread measles to about 14 people in a typical day, says Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “For families that have deeply held beliefs for whatever reason on this issue, it’s not my role to persuade them otherwise.”
She’s heard from parents who were alarmed to discover that their children attend school with so many unvaccinated kids, and from parents who passionately hold to the belief that childhood vaccines should be a matter of choice. Waldorf schools, she says, do not advocate for or against immunization.
That would run counter to the school’s philosophy of individual choice.
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And, in self-funded private schools like Waldorf, it could jeopardize the financial health of the school itself.Īnd yet, Bennett resisted telling her parents how to think, or what to do. The spread of a serious infection could further polarize parents on both sides of the vaccine divide. Working parents might find child care for sick kids difficult to secure. Children would be quarantined under public health protocols for 21 days, possibly longer. If measles were introduced into a school the size of Waldorf, which has nearly 400 students, the consequences could be catastrophic. None of the Waldorf students have contracted measles, although a case of strep throat created a brief scare. Once an outbreak gets rolling in an unvaccinated community, that’s when you worry about things getting out of control.” “Measles seeks out and finds the unvaccinated very, very well. “If you want to know how bad it can be, look at your population of unvaccinated,” says Jeffrey Duchin, the Seattle and King County Public Health Department’s chief health officer. Other pockets of vaccine-resistant parents can be found on rural Vashon Island, a 20-minute ferry ride across Puget Sound from Seattle in Bellingham, a midsize college town 17 miles south of the Canadian border and in the small schools with enrollments of 30 students that dot the wheat fields of eastern Washington and the city streets of conservative Spokane, whose politics and geography are more closely aligned with those of Idaho than those of the tree huggers in and around Seattle. The Waldorf School is home to one cluster among many. The diversity in these tinderboxes is clearly reflected in Washington State, which in 2008 had the highest rate of vaccine exemptions in the country. A single common thread unites them: reluctance to vaccinate. These clusters cross all dividing lines: socioeconomic classes, education levels, and political and religious views. Clusters of like-minded people disinclined to vaccinate their kids are scattered throughout every state that allows vaccine exemptions-whether in the megalopolises of California or in the rural outreaches of North Dakota. But more than anything, it revealed how widespread tinderboxes like Waldorf have become as the anti-vax movement gained momentum in the 15 years since measles was declared eliminated in the United States. The Disney outbreak laid bare an ugly divisiveness over childhood vaccines. “What keeps me awake at night?” says Tracy Bennett, who heads Seattle’s Waldorf school. That is the kind of number that, as the Disney outbreak spread to Washington State, put Waldorf on speed-dial at the Seattle and King County Public Health Department. In other words, 83 kids at Waldorf were at risk of catching measles. This thinking resonates so strongly that when the measles outbreak began at Disneyland late last year, 28 percent of the Seattle school’s students had not been inoculated against it. Many are also hesitant to vaccinate their children against childhood diseases. Like Waldorf parents in other states, Seattle’s Waldorf parents tend to be well-educated, mostly liberal, and able to afford tuition that tops out at $22,800 a year. It is also, in the view of public health officials, a tinderbox for illnesses like measles. SEATTLEThe Waldorf School in this city is part of a fast-growing global chain of private schools with a holistic curriculum emphasizing freedom and individuality.
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