Measles vaccine issue gets personal on Capitol Hill

Discussion of vaccines took a personal turn on Capitol Hill Tuesday as a congressman opened up about his painful memories of surviving measles as a child and urged parents to make sure their kids get vaccinated.

"Take the shot," said Rep. Michael Burgess, a physician and Texas Republican who came down with measles as a boy in the 1950s, before there was a vaccine. "We forgot about it, frankly," he said of the suffering that the disease once caused in the U.S.

At a House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee hearing, four top government health officials called the measles vaccine very safe and highly effective.

"Vaccines save lives and are the best way for parents to protect their children from vaccine-preventable diseases," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the immunization director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, said the decision to vaccinate against measles "is really a slam-dunk."

While most U.S. children have received the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, some parents avoid vaccinations for religious reasons, and others opt out citing concern that they might lead to autism -- a claim that scientific research has thoroughly debunked.

For Burgess, the current outbreak -- which started at Disneyland in December and has now sickened more than 100 people in 14 states -- brings back troubling memories.

"I had the measles in the fifties, prior to the vaccination being developed," he told CBS News. "Even years and years later I remember just how uncomfortable it was having those rigors, those chills. You wanted to bundle up with a big blanket but you couldn't stand for anything to be touching your skin. It's that level of discomfort."

"And of course this is in the backdrop of the fifties where moms and dads were worried about polio, moms and dads were worried about rubella, pregnant women were worried about rubella," he added. "So many of us forget that in the last fifty years we've seen the almost disappearance of vaccine-preventable diseases and it's one of the success stories of the last half century."

As for the vaccine, "It's the right thing to do for you and your child and of course for anyone with whom you may come in contact if you became infected," Burgess said.

Before the vaccine became available in 1963, measles killed 400 to 500 Americans each year, and left thousands of children deaf or brain damaged.

At Tuesday's hearing, top public health officials also faced questioning about the shortcomings of this year's flu vaccine. The current flu shot is only about 23 percent effective, far less than the usual 50 percent to 60 percent.

The experts took pains to explain why: Flu viruses constantly mutate, and the vaccine is changed yearly to keep up based on what scientists see circulating in other countries with earlier influenza seasons than ours. The government picked this year's recipe last February, and vaccine manufacturers started the months-long brewing process to make roughly 150 million doses.

In March, the CDC noticed a slightly different H3N2 virus strain was starting to circulate. The so-called drifted strain slowly grew more common over the summer. By late September, it accounted for half the strains in a global count, and the World Health Organization decided to the Southern Hemisphere should include that strain in the vaccine to be made for its next flu season.

But in the U.S., flu shots already were arriving on pharmacy shelves and it was too late to change, said CDC's Schuchat. There was no way to predict that this new H3N2 strain -- instead of the H3N2 version or two other flu strains included in the shot -- would be the winter's biggest cause of influenza, she said.

It's the fourth time in 20 years there's been an important mismatch with the vaccine, she said.

Lawmakers asked, why not just create an extra shot that was a better match? It would take six months to have a fairly large supply, Schuchat replied.

"We're all frustrated," Murphy said. "We need to speed up this process."

Fauci of the NIH noted that researchers are working hard to develop a universal flu vaccine to work against most strains.

In a typical year, about 24,000 Americans die of flu complications. It's too soon to know this year's toll, although CDC says more than 60 children have died so far, and flu-related hospitalizations among people 65 and older are at their highest since the government started keeping track nine years ago.