Anti-vaccination lobbyists are no experts, study finds

PARENTS who are apprehensive about inoculating their children for fear of adverse effects associated with vaccines could be relying on information from people with no expert knowledge of vaccines – a study by the South African Vaccination and Immunisation Centre has found.

Anti-vaccination lobbyists were found to be lay people – mostly parents, complementary or alternative medicine practitioners and sales persons, homeopaths and medical doctors who practiced homeopathy.

One of the vaccination campaigns which has been viewed with scepticism in South Africa is the schoolbased papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programme, that is being rolled out as part of the national drive to vaccinate young girls. Some parents had reportedly been refusing to have their children vaccinated because of health concerns.

The latest study – which investigated anti-vaccination lobbying on South African web pages between 2011 and 2013 – found that almost 70 percent of authors of anti-vaccination articles, blogs, forums and online shopping sites, were mostly parents, with just over half their web pages containing advertisements that promoted antivaccination claims.

Anti-vaccination claims were made about vaccine safety, vaccine effectiveness and profit motives.

Most, or 93 percent, of these claims included that vaccines were not safe, that the risk of adverse events following immunisation were higher than the risk of the disease, and that vaccination posed ethical and religious concerns.

About 33 percent of material suggested that vaccines were not safe, and another 33 percent said those promoting immunisation had financial interests and that vaccines were not responsible for the decline of infectious diseases.

Writing in the SA Medical Journal, lead researcher Dr Rosemary Burnett said although anti-vaccination lobbyists often claimed that vaccination was profit driven, the latest study showed that they were motivated by profit, with a large proportion of their pages being sponsored through advertising.

“This study found that South Africans have created web pages for local anti-vaccination lobbying, with many having financial interests in discrediting vaccines, and that they have taken their information from web pages largely originating in the US.

“Many of these lobbyists are parents, so it is possible that a growing number of South African parents are using search engines such as Google to find information about vaccination and are encountering misinformation instead,” she said.