Vaccination Remains Vital for Community Safety

ONCE CONSIDERED AN eliminated disease in the U.S., measles has surged in recent months in this country, with more than 1,000 people infected across 28 states as of this writing. Unfortunately, this uptick is caused by the low vaccination rates in some communities due to a lingering, misguided anti-vaccination movement. “The biggest misinformation has been this connection between measles vaccination and autism, which has completely been debunked as being absolutely false and based on no data,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.¹ Thankfully, despite anti-vaccine rhetoric and a slight decline in vaccination rates in the U.S., the number of people immunized against vaccine-preventable diseases remains relatively high, providing herd immunity that is vital for community safety. In this annual vaccine-themed issue, we report trends and changes in vaccination among select populations, as well as a new promising vaccine technology.

We begin our vaccines article series with a look at updates and improvements in vaccines for children and young adults. In our article “Following the Disease: Trends and Outbreaks Drive Subtle Changes to Vaccine Recommendations for Adolescents and Young Adults” (p.18), epidemiologist Hillary Johnson explores vaccine modifications for five diseases. A resurgence in mumps cases begun in 2015 has recently caused the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to revise its recommendation of two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to three doses. Also revised are ACIP’s expanded recommendation for the HPV vaccine for individuals age 27 years through 45 years in October 2018 and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ discontinued preference for the flu shot over the nasal spray vaccine for the 2019-20 influenza season. In addition, new vaccines have been introduced for the adolescent population, including two brands of meningococcal serogroup B vaccine and a yeast-derived hepatitis B vaccine. With these updates, we hope more disease outbreaks can be thwarted.

While upwards of 90 percent of parents vaccinate their children, seniors represent one population with the lowest vaccine-schedule adherence. As we examine in our article “Vaccinations for Seniors: Addressing Compliance” (p.24), three primary challenges contribute to nonvaccine compliance: age-related immunity that reduces theeffectiveness of some vaccines, nonunderstanding of what vaccines are recommended and when, and confusion about insurance coverage for vaccines. To reducethe health risks and the astronomical costs associated with vaccine-preventable illnesses, researchers are looking to develop optimally effective vaccines for older adults.

Considered highly promising, albeit technologically challenging, new DNA vaccines are more consistent in provoking immunity to disease, less expensive to produce, easier to speed to production and even helpful in fighting some cancers. Yet, as we explain in our article “Update on Conventional vs. DNA Vaccines” (p.30), the technology to produce DNA vaccines has been around for a quarter of a century, and still not one such vaccine has been created. The main problem stems from the delivery method of getting the bioengineered DNA into cells. If one promising method works, DNA vaccines may well be a new and better tool to fight infectious diseases.

As always, we hope you enjoy this issue of BioSupply Trends Quarterly, and find it both relevant and helpful to your practice.

Helping Healthcare Care,

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