In Disney they must be that they trill. A few days ago Disneyland was declared as the origin of the measles outbreak in California, which already affects more than 100 people (121 to be exact), and these days it has just been made public that PIXAR children's school, a Disney-owned company, has the lowest vaccination rates in Silicon Valley.
As I imagine you will know, Silicon Valley is the cradle of the future. The place where the most intelligent and / or creative minds of the moment reside and work, related mainly to the world of computer science and communications. There is Apple, IBM, Intel, Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo and so on. Well, in Wired they have dedicated themselves to research the vaccination rates of the children's schools of these companies and the results have been a bit surprising.
In many the minimum vaccination percentage is not achieved
I guess you will know what it is group immunity (Here we explained a few days ago). It is the protection that appears in the population when a high percentage of subjects are vaccinated against a specific virus. That is, for a population to be protected from a virus and it is practically impossible for an outbreak to occur, it is not necessary that everyone, that 100% of people, be vaccinated. It is enough to reach a certain percentage so that the outbreak is practically impossible (if most are vaccinated, even if a person is infected, the chances of more infections are minimal).
In the case of measles, the percentage of vaccination necessary for group immunity to occur is 92%. As well, six of the 12 nursery schools analyzed are below and in three cases they don't even reach 70%, as you can see in the following image.
When it comes to total vaccination, to children with the vaccines a day, PIXAR takes the prize to the lowest vaccination rates, remaining in a mean 43%. Cisco, Google and IBM cannot say that they have everything very controlled.
Eye, the data could be outdated
Apparently, once some of the companies have been contacted (PIXAR, apparently, does not respond), it has been found that the data may not be real. Children are not vaccinated there, but in health centers, so parents are the ones who have the obligation, once vaccinated, to deliver in the nursery schools an updated copy of the vaccination card so that the data is recent. As this sometimes takes a while to make, it is possible that the data, in fact, is somewhat better.
In any case, this lack of updating should affect all companies equally (more or less), and some of them have very high vaccination rates compared to others.
People with high socioeconomic levels tend to vaccinate less
These days, as a result of the California outbreak, the anti-vaccine movement is being studied a lot, in large part, to try to understand it. One of the characteristics that seems to be found is that they are usually parents with a relatively high socioeconomic level, or above average.
If we think about it a little, it makes sense, because they are people with better access to health systems, perhaps more distant from the disease than people from other social strata (worse housing conditions, education and worse habits, worse health) that, consequently, they lose a little fear of disease and look healthy and brave enough to dare to do otherwise. In addition, as workers of large multinationals, they are probably knowledgeable about how a large company behaves, even those who work in the world of health, such as pharmaceutical companies, which are sometimes authentic monsters.
Obviously, I am not saying that vaccines are bad because they are made by companies that sometimes behave unethically. I just say that, when you know that world better, you may come to think that there is a hidden interest in inoculating something that actually does nothing, even though vaccines are actually quite economical compared to the expense that each person gets to do in a pharmacy throughout life and although it has already been shown that childhood vaccines do nothing but save lives.
