Private sector shut down
As the death toll due to measles rose with the deaths of two more children, the Samoan Government has announced further measures to combat the disease. Last night it announced a complete shutdown of the private sector. The move comes a day after Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi shut down government offices to assist in the mass vaccination of all Samoan people.
Both the public and private sector will be closed tomorrow and Friday. Hundreds of volunteers are going to villages throughout Samoa this week to vaccinate all age groups. During the closure period, no vehicle will be permitted on the road unless it is a vehicle belonging to an exempt service from the public sector or a vehicle being used to seek medical assistance from a medical facility. The prime minister encouraged people to seek assistance from registered health officials rather than fake alternative ‘‘cures’’.
Imagine being a parent of young children in Samoa now. You would be beside yourself with worry, assuming – and this is not to put too fine a point on it – you weren’t already grieving.
It is a human tragedy on a mass scale. At the time of writing, there have been 53 deaths during the current measles epidemic, of which 48 have been children under the age of 4. The number of cases reported in Samoa now sits at about 4000. Out of a population of 200,000, that is 2 per cent, two of every 100 people. To put that in perspective, a similar infection rate in New Zealand would have us approaching 100,000 cases. It would be like nearly the entire population of Dunedin going down with measles.
One young Samoan couple, Fa’oso and Paulo Tuivale Puelua, have suffered the unimaginable pain of losing three of their five children, a 3-year-old son followed by 18-month-old twins, RNZ reported. Their mother is sleeping on a mat on their fresh grave, and reportedly blaming herself.
There are many questions to be asked and answered, vital ones, and they will be. Right now, though, the absolute priority for the Samoan government and the wide range of international assistance teams, including one from New Zealand, is to get on top of this epidemic as soon as possible. Health authorities there are conducting a mass vaccination campaign, which has resulted in a third of the population being vaccinated in less than a fortnight. The government has now announced the vaccine will be compulsory for all Samoans.
Which is the right move in the circumstances. Authorities have no time to debate its merits when they’re literally trying to save as many lives as possible. There are already more than enough fresh graves for grieving relatives to sleep on. Every second counts.
Tragically, Samoa’s situation has been made exponentially worse by misinformation. BBC news reports that the number of young children covered by vaccinations recently dropped to just 31 per cent, ‘‘compared to 99 per cent in nearby Nauru, Niue, and Cook Islands’’.
The low rate has partially been attributed to the deaths of two infants in July 2018, after they had received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. It was later found the nurses administering the vaccines had mixed it with an expired muscle relaxant, rather than water. The pair were sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
Exactly how much the incident contributed to Samoa’s appallingly low vaccination rates is unclear. With most deaths in the cohort under 4, some children now at the higher end of that bracket must already have been unvaccinated when it happened. However, it’s clear a tragedy begat a bigger tragedy. All that remains in the near term is to limit it.
Sheldon Yett, the Unicef representative to the Pacific, told the BBC that last year’s deaths had left an opening for misinformation to filter into. ‘‘People who are spreading lies and misinformation about vaccinations are killing children,’’ was his necessarily blunt assessment.
Hopefully the scale of the response will quickly bring this epidemic under control, and while it will be scant comfort for the families of those lost or fighting the disease, there is now a clear example of the dangers of misinformation and low vaccination rates for the World Health Organisation to point to as measles cases rise in other countries.
‘‘I miss my children, they were not supposed to die,’’ said Fa’oso Puelua. No, they weren’t.
... it’s clear a tragedy begat a bigger tragedy. All that remains in the near term is to limit it.