This is probably (and weirdly) the most controversial topic I've written about so far, but I've been watching the arguments about vaccinations over the last few years and find the whole thing a little fascinating. The most recent events in New York with the Mayor having to order vaccinations to happen and the UK debating if they should become compulsory have brought this story back to my mind. (Oh, and I don't have any vaccine appropriate photos, so I'm just going to fill this blog with beautiful photos of scenery and wildlife).
The first time I became aware that vaccinations were seen as an issue (a great surprise to me) was in 1998 after a paper published in The Lancet by (no longer Dr) Andrew Wakefield and some colleagues linked the MMR vaccination to the development of autism with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) in children. Despite the results being proven to be wrong, there being evidence of bad practice, and the findings of a very serious conflict of interest on Wakefield's side this paper led to a climate of mistrust in vaccinations. This unfortunately lead to a reduction in vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland (NHS showed that the MMR vaccination rate in England in 2017-2018 is 91.2% which is below the 95% recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO)), and an increase in the number of individuals diagnosed with the diseases these vaccines are designed to protect from.
I could write a whole blog on how that research paper and Wakefield were wrong, but I would rather not give him anymore time and instead want to look at some of the myths I have heard about vaccinations recently.
The two I find most interesting are the ideas that the reduction in these diseases in recent years are due to the fact that the infection rate is now low anyway, and that it is due to an improvement is the general hygiene of our society as a whole.
Let's start with this idea of sanitation. It's true that improvements in sanitation and hygiene as well as the production of antibiotics have placed an important role in reducing the number of diseases that now kill us, and we should be very grateful for that, but they are not the only factors. For one, antibiotics can only help with bacteria infection and even the best hygiene practices in the world can not prevent all diseases from spreading - hence the reason we still catch colds ever year. It is vaccinations that really help our bodies fight these diseases when we are exposed to them. If we look at the last 50 years we can see that, whilst hygiene levels have remained pretty similar, diseases like measles have still shown a steady decline and this is due to vaccinations .
As for the idea of infection rates being low, this is actually due to what is known as the 'herd immunity'. As long as a large majority of the population are vaccinated against an infectious disease it is not actually able to establish itself in the population and spread, giving the appearance of a low infection rate. This is especially important as those individuals who aren't able to be vaccinated, such as the elderly, very young infants, and pregnant ladies, are also usually the most vulnerable. If vaccination rates keep dropping then this will open up the opportunity for viruses and bacteria to establish themselves in the population and spread.
Another argument I've heard recently is in connection to the chemicals found in the vaccinations, most notably heard about from Kat Von D. It's completely understandable that this would worry people, but unfortunately the information provided on this has either been very misleading in it's incompleteness or non-existent. The ones I've heard most about are thiomersal (mercury), aluminium based adjuvants, and formaldehyde. Thiomersal is no longer used in any of the vaccinations provided in the UK and, even so, the WHO have stated that there are no risks in the level of thiomersal found in vaccinations. Adjuvants are designed to help boost your immune systems response to the vaccination and most killed vaccinations contain a small amount of aluminium based adjuvants. Though aluminium can be toxic in large doses, the amount found in vaccinations are too small to cause any problems. Lastly, formaldehyde. This is used during the first stages of killed vaccines productions and is diluted out in later production. It is possible that there will still be trace amounts in the vaccine given, but not enough to cause any health concerns. In fact, the level of formaldehyde found naturally in your blood stream (to help with metabolism) is much higher then that found in vaccines.
The last reason for not vaccinating I'm going to write about here (otherwise this will be a very long blog indeed) is the idea that naturally acquired immunity, ie actually catching the disease, is better than vaccinated immunity and there have been cases where this has caused a stronger immunity to the disease. However, the cost to this approach is far more severe and I feel not really worth the risk. If we look at measles, if caught naturally there is a 1 in 5000 chance that you will die from your symptoms. Compare that to the chance of having an allergic reaction to the MMR vaccination, which is 1 in 1 million (a number based in the fact that they have had practically no reports of this). I'd rather go for the vaccination.
The truth is that it wasn't so long ago that life was particularly brutal, especially for children with 43% of children in the 1800s dying before their 5th birthday. This has dropped significantly to 4.3% in 2015 (data taken from https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality). A large proportion of these deaths were due to diseases like measles, smallpox, and whooping cough, and all of which are preventable by a simple vaccination. With the WHO estimating that vaccinations prevent around 2-3 million deaths a year I think these are little injections well worth having and are not the little monsters some would like them to be.
Perhaps I should leave the last word on this to Roald Dahl and his open letter to parents about the death of his own daughter to measles and the steps we would have taken if he could have. https://www.roalddahl.com/roald-dahl/timeline/1960s/november-1962
Websites about vaccinations you might find interesting are:
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