Doc’s u-turn with sick kid
Straight-talking Kaitaia doctor Lance O’Sullivan has been the face of opposition to Vaxxed – yet he had refused to watch it. So this week, he agreed to critique the controversial movie.
It was 1996 and we were young parents. I was at medical school when I came upon an antiimmunisation pamphlet left in one of our lecture theatres.
I was suspicious of the establishment at the time. You need to understand, I had grown up a welfare-dependent ‘‘half-caste’’ (I hate that term) boy living with his mother, escaping from a life of alcohol, crime and violence. An under-achiever, I was expelled from two secondary schools. I felt I had a reason to be angry at ‘‘the system’’.
Then I became a father. It changed my life. I needed to be a responsible adult caring for a son, then a daughter – eventually seven children. We were young parents and wanted to do only the best for these precious beings.
I read the pamphlet. It described ‘‘studies’’ in Holland into communities that didn’t look like mine, but I took little persuasion. I stated our second child, our little daughter Te Miringa, would not be immunised.
At the time my wife Tracy was working as a nurse at the local medical centre and immunising children daily. Yet this was my a protest against the establishment that I so mistrusted.
Fifteen months later, we had a scare. Te Miringa became unwell with high fever and body rash and the doctors were concerned as there was a measles outbreak locally. And I realised the information from Holland did not reflect my reality. We got Te Miringa immunised. One year later Te Miringa was in the Starship children’s hospital with a severe eye infection. I remember the doctors on the ward round asking if our child was immunised, because historically the most common cause for this potentially fatal condition (it can lead to brain infection and abscess and death) was Haemophilus Influenza.
I recall their relief and ours when they advised us that her immunisation had all but eliminated this killer condition from the list of culprits. I recall the pride when I could say that our child was fully immunised and as protected as possible, knowing that then, like now, that while we could not provide 100 per cent cover from every ailment, we had made the best decision.
Te Miringa is now at my old medical school, on a pathway to practising medicine.
I was not going to stand by and allow a lady who in all likelihood lives in a warm, dry and insulated mud brick solar-powered three-bedroom home where she home schools her 1.9 children to come to Kaitaia and peddle a flawed argument.
Twenty years later and three weeks ago on a cold Kaitaia night, I went to protest the presence of a movement that causes illness and misery by spreading misinformation – the same misinformation that, at a different time in my life, I had wanted to believe.
In the face of such overwhelming evidence of the benefit of immunisation, where does the liberty of free speech need to be measured against outcomes where babies die of whooping cough?
I have had to make the uncomfortable call to send a young baby with whooping cough symptoms home with her young mother to the family’s cold, overcrowded home in a rural isolated community.
I may not be able to build that mother a new home but I can surely advocate for building the resilience of her baby with immunisations.
My protest on that night in Kaitaia has been called many things: aggressive, intimidating, arrogant, childish and wrong. I don’t disagree with some of these – it was a protest! This was not my first and will not be my last protest.
The benefit for me to have all of our children immunised is, yes, they will have greater protection for their health during their young life and now with more recent immunisations into their adult life.
The HPV vaccine is a challenging one for parents to consider. Immunising 12-year-old children against a sexually transmitted infection is a tough decision. However, you only need to look after women with metastatic cervical cancer who are leaving behind their whanau in the prime of their lives to know how important these tough decisions are.
Treating young children who are minutes away from dying from an obstructing warty mass in their throats caused by HPV infections brings home the harsh reality that science has been, and continues to be, here to help the human race. Science helps people like me who work hard for the communities we care about.
Iwas trying to step away from this debate, as the anti-vaccination people who lurk in the shadows of social media play the man, not the ball.
The argument, however, is that people want to hear exactly what my objections are. I have just watched-Vaxxed and these are the reasons I reject the assertions made by this movement and this propaganda.
This movie is directed by a man who has been widely discredited and his initial ‘‘research’’ has been shown to be flawed. Science and legitimate evidence has to prevail over what is essentially dramatised reality television.
There is no doubting the pain that the families of children with chronic severe health problems endure, but to use them to advance this misinformation is wrong.
Falsely associating severe health problems with immunisation is undermining one of the most effective public health strategies of our time, alongside access to clean water and sanitation.
The numbers of preventable diseases that harmed and killed our children have dramatically dropped since the introduction of vaccination programmes.
The undeniable fact that is not presented in this movie is that vaccination has saved millions of lives, including tens of thousands of New Zealand children.
This fact has not been acknowledged at all, yet there is constant reference to a underlying conspiracy that attempts to undermine the trust that public should have in a global health system driven by people like myself and colleagues who aspire only to serve our communities.
The allegation by a mere handful of people in this movie – that hundreds of thousands of expert scientists around the world have been silenced, threatened or bribed to allow a shadowy movement to harm the world’s children – is ludicrous as well as unforgivably dangerous.
We see people on a daily basis getting better because of the treatments that someone, somewhere, has spent time and effort to develop.
One supposed whistleblower – in all probability a disaffected employee or peer – has to be held up against thousands of scientists who would covet the opportunity to discover the next new treatment for conditions such as autism or uncover any supposed shadowy programme of deceit if it existed.
Effective uptake of immunisation programmes protects those vulnerable in our society who cannot be vaccinated, such as young and old patients who have cancer or other serious medical conditions.
It is a fact that autism rates have increased over recent decades but this is partly due to a better understanding of a complex syndrome that we previously classified under the generic term of intellectual disability.
There is growing evidence that genetic and environmental factors (pregnancy exposures, early childhood infections and what we consume) are significant contributors to the development of autism in the face of clear evidence that vaccinations are not.
Autism societies around the world and numerous parents with autistic children agree: immunisation is safe. It is a complete insult to any such parent to suggest they might have been responsible for autism by choosing vaccination.
The assertion that Big Pharma is raking in millions belies the fact that vaccinations are probably the least lucrative products these businesses could be developing and marketing. The most lucrative products are medications that are developed to treat the excesses of our lifestyles – diabetes, heart disease, cancer and, would you believe it, erectile dysfunction.
That is why I spoke up in Kaitaia. I was not going to stand by and allow a lady who in all likelihood lives in a warm, dry and insulated mud-brick, solar-powered three-bedroom home where she home schools her 1.9 children to come to Kaitaia and peddle the flawed argument espoused by two white males of privilege who stand to profit from their roadshow – a circus that has, and will, claim the wellbeing and lives of children around the world.
This comes in a week when a Unicef report has given New Zealand a big F grade on how we care for our children. It is time for us to make a stand against anyone who would challenge our commitment to redeem ourselves as a country and society.
New Zealand is close to eradicating measles; any reduction in rates of immunisation will see the return of this awful disease.
We cannot allow misinformation like that of the anti-vaxxers to operate in the shadows and cause irreparable harm. We need to confront these people.
After Brexit, after Donald Trump’s election, during this time of global upheaval it is easy to believe in government/corporate collusion, conspiracy theories and manipulation by the establishment. We cannot allow this suspicion and misinformation to triumph.
I know it can be confusing as a parent to know what are the best decisions to make for our children. Sometimes, it might just come down to trust. Trust in someone to provide the best possible advice because we cannot expect every citizen to have an expert view on every issue.
I believe in the absolute importance and safety of immunisation and I stand by my protest.