This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
☔Showers ahead, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 5:53 p.m. It’s day 20 of the federal government shutdown.
All this week we’ll be looking at vaccination rates across Massachusetts as part of our “Connecting the Commonwealth” series, Unraveling Immunity. And we want to hear from you: what conversations have you had about vaccines in your family or community? Reply to this email or send a note to daily@wgbh.org and we might include your thoughts in a future newsletter.
Four Things to Know
1. Thousands of people came to Boston Common on Saturday for the city’s No Kings rally, part of a national day of pro-democracy protests. GBH’s Anna Luecht has a photo essay here showing scenes from the day — signs, messages, and a group of people in lobster costumes with a sign reading “No Shellfish Kings.”
“In Boston, every day is ‘No Kings Day,’” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu told the crowd. “When it comes to our rights, when it comes to our families, Boston doesn’t back down.” Boston’s rally was one of an estimated 2,600 events nationwide.
2. The Nov. 4 general election in Boston is 15 days away, and residents in city council District 7, which covers Roxbury, are getting ready to elect a new representative to the council. The district’s last councilor, Tania Fernandes Anderson, is now serving a federal prison sentence for corruption charges.
Residents of the district “want to be able to continue to live in a community that they love, a community that they’ve grown up in and a community that has in some ways turned its back on them for whatever reasons,” neighborhood activist Dorothea Jones told GBH’s Under the Radar. “I think that there are a lot of issues that definitely need to be worked on. And hopefully, with the new city council coming in, they will lead and show some direction for all of us to follow and to work together on.”
3. A former worker with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Boston office — one of about 15 people fired last month after signing a letter of dissent against the Trump administration’s policies — said the experience hasn’t deterred them from pursuing a career in environmental engineering, and encouraged others interested in the field to persevere.
“I was working on permits that are legally required as part of the Clean Air Act. And now there’s one less person doing that,” environmental engineer Lane To said. “Construction projects that are planning on moving forward and need clearances are perhaps going to be more slow to get to that point because there’s less people reviewing permits. And in cases where a permit might be violated and they’re waiting on... action on EPA’s part to do something about that, a polluter could keep polluting for a longer amount of time because there’s less people working.”
4. A group of Massachusetts high school students received $900,000 to support programs and nonprofits they care about. They chose three nonprofits focused on health care, biotech and career readiness.
Julie Lammers is president and CEO of American Student Assistance in Boston, which ran the program. She said, “What we see quite a bit is gatekeeping when it comes to philanthropy — social capital is a real challenge. You might not be able to access philanthropic capital if you don’t know who to reach out to, or to have a connection with someone that might connect you to a funder,” she said. “Instead of waiting for organizations to come to us, we actually went to a list of organizations that some of our students that we serve have worked with over the years, have been impacted by or could recommend to us. So we had a list that was kind of opposite to the way the philanthropic world works. We were trying to lower some of those access barriers.”
What’s leading parents on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket to bypass vaccines?
Neither Martha’s Vineyard nor Nantucket have had a single case of the measles in recent years. But there is a confluence of factors that makes local epidemiologist Lea Hamner worry: high rates of travel on and off the islands and the highest rates of vaccine exemptions in the state over the last decade. The share of kindergarteners vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella has hovered between 92 and 96%.
That rate is even lower at Chilmark Elementary School — 82% of kindergartners over the last three years had received both MMR vaccine doses, state data show, though some kids got their shots after entering kindergarten. Public health professionals generally say 95% of people should be vaccinated for effective herd immunity.
“If measles gets into these tight-knit, under-vaccinated communities, it’s explosive. It might be an after-school program, social circles and potlucks,” Hamner told GBH’s Chris Burrell. “And those people, when they get together and measles enters the room, it’s devastating. Nine out of 10 are nearly guaranteed to get measles if you have no immunity and you’re exposed.”
Dr. Sonya Stevens, a pediatrician on Martha’s Vineyard, said she’s noticed “a rise in vaccine hesitancy” in her 11 years practicing medicine on the island. Some of those beliefs stem from misinformation found on social media — such as the idea that eating organic foods is just as effective as vaccines in preventing infectious diseases (there’s no scientific evidence to support this.)
“If [people] feel like they live a healthy lifestyle in nature and eat organic food and are as chemical-free as feasible, it may be a healthier lifestyle,” Stevens told Burrell. “It doesn’t necessarily give you any protection against infectious diseases, but I do think it gives people this halo of feeling less vulnerable.”
That said: things seem to be changing. Vaccine exemptions for kindergarteners fell from a high of 12% in 2015 to 4.2% this year, a shift public health officials attributed to a social media campaign with well-known Martha’s Vineyard residents — and to changing demographics.
“You’re seeing an increase in vaccines because you’re seeing 40 to 50% of the down-island schools are Brazilian now, and they’re vaccinated,” retired school nurse Janice Brown told Burrell.
Want to learn more? Read the full story here.
Dig deeper:
-These Massachusetts parents sought religious exemptions to vaccines. We asked them why.
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