Letter

Vaccination debate inflames reaction

Dear healthmatters— As the parent of an unvaccinated child, I would like to respond to Michael Corr’s article (Opposition is sadly myth-led, issue 22).

My initial concerns were whether the benefits of vaccination outweighed the risks. The decision not to vaccinate was not taken lightly and was only made after researching the subject myself as I felt unhappy with the information provided to parents. At that time I believed in vaccination and assumed that a vaccinated child would actually be protected from disease. It came as something of a shock to learn that this is by no means certain.

Medical practices generally evolve and improve as more is learned and I have great respect for the advances made in medicine. This respect no longer extends to vaccination as the practice has hardly evolved since the first vaccine took place some 200 years ago. At that time, the immune response was unheard of and even today, how the immune response works is still riot fully understood.

The decision whether or not to vaccinate a child can only be made when provided with all the information available, not just information selected by the Health Education Authority. If the role of the HEA is ‘to put the evidence across so that there is no doubt that immunisation is the safest way to reduce the risk of the serious infectious diseases’ then I find it hard to believe that the ‘evidence’ will be unbiased and complete.

The incidence of and death rate from infectious diseases declined rapidly from the late 1800s. This was due to improved living conditions, specifically decent sanitation, clean water and improved diet. The death rate from infectious diseases overall had declined by around 90 per cent before any of the current vaccines were introduced. Continued decline of infectious diseases is not evidence that vaccines were responsible.

Given that clean water, decent sanitation and a healthy diet have no harmful side-effects and resulted in a far greater decline than can be claimed for the vaccines, ‘I would certainly question whether vaccination is the safest way to reduce the risk of infectious diseases.

By avoiding mentioning when exactly whooping cough infected over 100,000 children every year, with the death rate 1 per 1,000 cases, the impression given in the article is that the vaccine was solely and immediately responsible for the drop to 2,500 cases in 1973. The epidemics that followed the fall in the uptake of the whooping cough vaccine in the late 1970s had the lowest mortality rate ever. By noting that 100,000 cases were recorded ill these epidemics, Mr Corr is leading readers to believe that the death rate would still have been 1 per 1,000 cases.

Mr Corr has also failed to mention that a high proportion of cases were observed in fully vaccinated children. In fact this has been the case since the introduction of the vaccine. In 1969 the Public Health Laboratory Service reported that the whooping cough vaccines were ‘not very effective’ as they failed to control outbreaks or to protect fully vaccinated children from infection.

Medical journals continue to report on the whooping cough vaccine’s lack of effectiveness. For example, the Journal of Paediatrics in 1989 carried a report of an enhanced whooping cough surveillance programme. The report concluded that the vaccine was only 45 per cent effective even after three doses.

In 1995 an article in the British Medical Journal reported on a survey of whooping cough from 1977-92. The survey showed that the disease is much less severe than suggested in the textbooks.

If the vaccine is not very effective and the disease is not the danger we have been led to believe, do the benefits of vaccination really outweigh the risks indeed what are the benefits of the whooping cough vaccine?

I find the measles example in Mr Corr’s article similarly misleading.

I would also question Mr Corr’s claim that the information on vaccine side effects is not being suppressed. In the Health Education Authority book New Birth To Five, given to all new parents, the only HIB vaccine side-effect mentioned is that one in ten will develop a small red swelling that disappears within 48 hours.

Side-effects listed by a vaccine manufacturer, however, include: fever; headache; malaise; irritability; inconsolable and high-pitched screaming; seizures; cyanosis; erythema; anaphylaxis. The medical journal Pediatrics in 1987 carried a report on reactions attributed to the Hib vaccine. They listed some 44 reactions including: death; anorexia; leukaemia; vomiting; arthralgia; diabetes; syncope; convulsions.

Added to this, the Vaccine Damage Payments Unit acknowledge that vaccines can cause: encephalopathy followed by permanent brain damage; convulsions followed by chronic epilepsy and possible mental retardation; severe behaviour changes after an initial neurologic reaction; paralysis due to polio.

I accept that some of these reactions are uncommon, however, the passive monitoring system we have in this country is acknowledged to be less than perfect and means that there will always be an under-reporting of side-effects, so no-one really knows how many children are vaccine damaged but tile numbers will certainly be higher than the official statistics.

For example, at least 1 in 200 people have epilepsy. How many of these cases are caused by vaccination? If parents do not know vaccines can cause epilepsy, how are they to make the connection and how is the real number of vaccine damaged children ever to be assessed?

Parents are asked to give their consent to the vaccination of their children. In effect they are taking responsibility for the consequences. How can a parent make that decision when they have access to only part of the information?