ANTI-VACCINATION IDEAS GAIN TRACTION
Comeback of communicable diseases due to parents’ refusal to inoculate children
ARISING tide of suspicion amplified by social networks has eroded public trust in modern medicine, leaving scientists and health officials scrambling for ways to shore up its credibility, experts said.
Especially in rich nations, faith has waned in vaccines that have saved millions from the ravages of polio, tetanus, small pox, influenza and many other once rampant and deadly diseases.
“The level of confidence is not what it was 20 years ago,” French immunologist Alain Fischer said.
The scale of scepticism is startling. A survey conducted by the British Academy of Medical Sciences last year found that only 37 per cent of Britons trusted evidence from medical research. Two-thirds cited friends and family as more reliable.
A quarter of 1,500 parents polled in the United States last year believed that vaccines could cause autism in healthy children, despite a complete lack of credible evidence.
These opinions have consequences. Whooping cough, measles and mumps — communicable diseases that had effectively disappeared — have seen a resurgence in the US in the last decade due to the number of parents refusing to inoculate their toddlers rose above the threshold needed to ensure, what scientists call, “herd immunity”.
In France, health authorities were forced to take action: as of this year, any child that has not been vaccinated for 11 specific diseases will not be admitted to kindergarten or school.
Many factors accounted for this upsurge in mistrust, experts said.
Most damaging, perhaps, are a series of scandals involving inadequately vetted drugs, poor oversight by health officials and attempted cover-ups.
France was shaken by a blood scandal in which nearly 4,000 people were infected with the HIV virus in the 1980s after receiving contaminated blood transfusions.
Another medical misstep was the publication in 1998 by The Lancet, a respected medical journal, of a research that drew a causal link between vaccines and autism in children.
When it was revealed that evidence underlying this claim had been falsified, the study was withdrawn and its author, Andrew Wakefield, barred from the profession.
But, the damage was done. Vaccines and other medicines are also a victim of their success.
“We no longer see the diseases, just reports about possible sideeffects,” said Cornelia Betsch, a researcher at the University of Erfurt, Germany, who has written extensively about vaccine policy.
“This leads us to over-estimate the risks of vaccination and under-estimate the risks of the diseases.”
But, the underlying logic of vaccines seem counter-intuitive, said Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
“Injecting septic substances into my body to prevent disease is not a natural idea.”
In 2014, Donald Trump, now US president, tweeted: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, does not feel good and changes — AUTISM. Many such cases!”
He later tweeted that childhood vaccinations were acceptable, but not in “1 massive dose.”