Film - "Community Immunity"

In November 2026, the U.S. is likely to lose its “measles elimination status.” While this is a term used as a measure of geographic, collective success against a pathogen in public health, many families may not have a sense of how this change affects them — if at all.

Community Immunity: Caring About Our Neighbors, explores this question through interviews with families and those who work in public health. At the heart of this exploration is “community immunity,” the idea that a pathogen’s ability to move through a group of people is dependent on their collective protection against that pathogen. “When we have fire drills, the first thing they always tell us is close the door because that slows the danger from moving through the building. Community immunity works the same way,” says Charlotte Moser, Co-Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (VEC at CHOP). “When you have people who are immunized, they represent the closed doors. So, the more closed doors we have, the more the pathogen has a difficult time getting through that community.”

Carrie Cianfrone, the mom of Jack, a child who needed to rely on that collective protection when he was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia agrees, “Community immunity is really like a fortress around someone that can't be vaccinated.” As Carrie describes in the film, “We really had to rely on everyone around us and around him at school to be vaccinated so that he could be protected from viruses that his body hadn't been vaccinated against at that time.”

When it comes to measles, parents like Carrie and Julia McKenna didn’t need to worry about protecting their sick children against this disease. “Measles is definitely something that I didn't think I would ever have to worry about,” says Julia when talking about protecting her daughter, Rosie, who was diagnosed at 11 months of age with atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor, or ATRT, a condition which causes tumors in the brain or spine. 

“We eliminated measles by the year 2000.” says Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the VEC at CHOP. “It would not spread from one American child to another because we had a high level of community immunity.” 

“We had trained a whole generation of physicians that had never seen a measles case,” adds Katherine Wells, Director of Public Health in Lubbock, Texas.

And now we're starting to see this disease reemerge. We're losing community immunity. 

“Losing measles elimination status is something that can be detrimental for someone like me,” describes Tameka Johnson, a survivor of osteosarcoma as a teen and breast cancer 18 years later. Likening measles to COVID-19, Johnson adds, “I was so scared, and I'm explaining to my daughter how important it was for her to wear her mask when she was in school, because ‘mommy can get sick to the point where she does not come home.’ You know, having to really be real with her, and explain that. That's how I feel about the measles.”

Watch Community Immunity: Caring About Our Neighbors, premiering Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 2:00 PM ET on the Vaccine Makers Project YouTube channel.