The recent measles outbreak in California is being blamed on mostly affluent Orange County parents who are refusing to vaccinate their kids because they are afraid. The fear factor, according to public health officials, stems from a disputed belief that vaccine injuries cause autism and other developmental disorders. In California, as in Maine, parents can opt out of vaccinating their school-age children by signing a philosophical exemption and children can attend school unless there is an infectious disease going around.

States are beginning to tighten up this exemption, and now Maine is considering it again.

Looking at the situation honestly, it’s hard to blame this whole thing on parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids. According to the CDC and state public health officials in California, many of the measles cases involved people who had been fully vaccinated. In a recent pertussis epidemic in San Diego, 85 percent of those who had become ill were fully vaccinated, and that’s not unusual. The vaccine loses effectiveness quickly; within a year of the vaccine, the effectiveness drops to 70 percent, according to the CDC.

Mumps is making a comeback among the vaccinated — in an outbreak in 2009-10, the majority of people who contracted the illness had been fully immunized. Chickenpox, which offers lifelong immunity if one has the natural disease, is attacking young vaccinated adults in droves as the vaccine wears off. Not only does it wear off, the CDC admits that 10 to 30 percent of people vaccinated against chickenpox will get the disease if exposed to the virus; it’s not as effective as once believed. The shingles vaccine is effective only 50 percent of the time and actually occasionally causes shingles in the targeted population, people over the age of 60, albeit a less serious case.

Hepatitis B vaccine is given to infants in the first day of life, regardless of whether their mother has the illness. Because of how the disease is transmitted, children born of HepB-negative mothers would not need this vaccine until at least adolescence.

The schedule of infant vaccination in the United States, by the way, increased from 10 injections in 1983 to 36 in 2014. The government, since 1988, has shelled out billions in vaccine injury compensation for thousands of vaccine injured children. Injuries include encephalitis, sometimes leading to chronic brain injury, chronic arthritis, gastrointestinal problems, and sensory and behavioral disorders.

In short, parents see a distinction between public health concerns that benefit the community as a whole — the socalled “herd immunity” — and ethical medical treatment for their own children. That’s because there is a distinction. Children are immunized, in part, for their own benefit, but largely for the benefit of others — young infants, the immunecompromised, and adults who won’t or can’t get their own jabs.

But even the small number of vaccine injuries admitted to by the government in their reporting system represent actual children with actual lifelong disabilities. And until comparatively recently, the government didn’t even report such things so that parents could make informed medical choices for their children.

Is there any doubt why many parents are skeptical of the full-court press that public health departments and the CDC are putting on about accelerated vaccine schedules for small children?

Forcing wary Maine parents to conform to the new aggressive vaccine schedule is not the way to go. Instead, the CDC and state public health officials must do a better job of convincing parents that every immunization in the schedule is safe and effective and necessary when given — and ensuring that is really the case.