The truth about vaccination

Note – this is a cross-post from the original article at the Young Australian Skeptics.

Ever noticed how the “proofs” offered up for positions of belief such as religion or pseudoscience, or personal tenets which run completely counter to the current body of evidence, such as climate change deniers or the anti-vaccination lobby, always seem to rely heavily on the weight of personal anecdote? Funny that.

Well, although we don’t take anecdote as proof (the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”), I thought I’d offer up my own anecdotes about vaccination in a 1^st-world Western democracy, and maybe try to alleviate some of the fears and concerns which new parents inevitably experience.

Our little girl is now almost four months old, and is due for her next round of vaccinations. The Victorian Government Department of Health has a comprehensive website about the National Immunisation Program Schedule which details precisely what vaccines she’s already received, when she’s due for booster shots and which products are used each time. The product names are particularly useful, because in each case you can easily do online research about the product. Information is usually readily available from the manufacturer’s website (eg: GlaxoSmithKline’s MMR vaccine) or from independent third-party sites like the very excellent Medicines.co.uk. An important thing to note is that this information generally contains the ingredients, and if any anti-vaccers stumble across this article (unlikely) then you might like to note the general lack of mercury, you lying, sociopathic fear merchants.

By the time she’s just 12 months old, our daughter will have been immunised against a raft of nasties, including diptheria, hepatitis B and poliomyelitis.

You’ll be pleased to know that the vaccination message is pushed loudly and strongly in the hospital as well as in all the follow-up visits and mother’s group meetings. There isn’t a shortage of education on offer, although there is obviously far more detailed, product-specific information available online.

Vaccinations are free—there’s never anything to pay at all, and it’s a great example of our tax dollars at work. In fact, until you’ve gone through the health system it’s sometimes hard to get an appreciation of how much infrastructure is in place for our benefit. Yes we bitch about it from time to time, and of course things could be more efficient and equitable, but damn we’re fortunate.

If you’re planning to put your child into child care at some stage (and it seems that most of us are, whether we particularly want to or not) then you’re eligible for Child Care Benefit from the Australian Government’s Family Assistance Office. It is means-tested and there are eligibility criteria, one of which is that your child has to be up-to-date with their vaccination schedule. So basically, immunise your child with vaccines which you don’t have to pay for and at some stage the government will hand over money.…not too shoddy, eh?

However—here’s where the dark clouds gather to rain on this parade. It’s not all sweetness and light, unfortunately.

People who choose not to vaccinate their children are in no way penalised for doing so. In fact, couples eligible for an “approved exemption” can still receive the Child Care Benefit without having to vaccinate their children. Such exemptions are if either adult is a member of the Church of Christ Scientist (and you need an official letter stating that) or you have a “conscientious objection” to immunisation and you can get a health care provider to sign off on a form stating as much.

There are, of course, valid reasons why some children will not be immunised, such as serious medical contraindications, the unavailability of a particular vaccine or prior allergic reactions. In those circumstances the government isn’t looking to penalise couples, which is as it should be.

But what is absolutely outrageous is that so-called conscientious objectors are not only not penalised but are still eligible for tax-funded payouts. Of course the government can’t get into the business of forcing people to act against their will, but it sure can remove a reward system in place to promote public health from those people happy to flaunt it.

While researching for this article, I gave my mum a call (aren’t I a good son?) to find out what things were like when I was a child. I was born in the UK, and I wanted to know what public attitude was like towards vaccination in the late 1970s (yes, I’m that old…). Essentially until the MMR scare-mongering came along, no-one considered not vaccinating their children—it was just what you did as a parent. Possibly because people of our parents’ generation were much more familiar with childhood disease—they would have encountered children with whooping cough, TB or polio. For them, these illnesses were real, and the prospect of protecting their own children was something they seized upon.

As a positive act towards public health and true eradication of disease, vaccination is only truly effective if everyone takes part. In my daughter’s case, her vaccinations may have been effective, or they may not. Only time will tell. However in an ideal world everyone she associates with will also have had their jabs, so the likelihood of her encountering someone carrying an active virus should be massively reduced. That’s the whole point of mass vaccination—it even protects those for whom the vaccines don’t work.

Now, she faces the very real possibility of socialising with other children who haven’t been immunised, and I have to say that this scares seven shades of excrement out of me. I never really thought I’d have to deal with this in my lifetime. The uninformed, selfish choices of a few are now affecting all of us.

If you choose to not have your child vaccinated, the consequences of that choice are not limited to your immediate family, but to everyone your child comes into contact with. For the rest of us, there’s not much we can do to minimise the risk most of the time, but it’s worth checking with your child care provider and/or school whether vaccination is one of their prerequisites before accepting a child.

There is quite obviously a widening gap between personal choice and public responsibility. Those of us now having children have not had to deal with the impact of childhood illnesses and there seems to be a prevalent attitude of slackness brought about through the luxury of living in a scientifically-advanced society, so as we’re no longer dying of diphtheria or being crippled by polio we seem to feel that now is the time to turn our back on the science which gave us this gift and start dabbling in placebos and sugar pills, basking in the warmth of our alternative open-mindedness.

I don’t know what the appropriate response should be. Public shaming for parents? Special schools for non-immunised children? What I do know is that the years of sterling work done by scientists, medical practitioners and governments is being systematically undermined by lies, misinformation, unwitting ignorance and fear. We need to keep raising awareness of the dangers which our children are now facing.