There's an excellent reason why you've never seen someone suffering the ills of smallpox, with hard, scabbing pustules forming on their body "like peas under the skin." It's the same reason polio, a crippling disease, no longer exists in the U.S.

With the eyes of the world focused on the emerging coronavirus vaccines, it's astonishing to think the foundations of the science date back more than 200 years.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought infectious disease terminology into the mainstream. One term is herd immunity—or community protection.

Las Vegas health officials are confident they’ll be prepared to rapidly administer an eventual coronavirus vaccine. They are less confident that people will take it.

As the search continues for a safe and effective vaccine against the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes COVID-19, 3 experts have weighed in on a question that has been on many parents’ minds: Will schools make any future vaccine mandatory for children?

Should the measles vaccination be mandatory? Is there a moral responsibility for a parent to get their children vaccinated?

If your child attends school or day care, you probably know vaccines are required for attendance. But you might not realize some rules have recently changed in certain areas. For example, this year New York state stopped allowing families to take a religious exemption to vaccines required for school. California vaccine law also stopped allowing religious exemptions in 2015.

As the bioethicist Johan C. Bester wrote in 2018: “The correct lens through which to view vaccination is moral obligation — we are obligated to provide children with protection against measles. Parents who have children eligible for vaccination are obligated to facilitate vaccination. Parents who have children that cannot receive vaccination are obligated to advocate for sufficient vaccine uptake in the general population. … Measles vaccination rightly belongs to the realm of parental obligation, a duty owed to the child and to society.”