Encounter with anti-vaccine fanatics

“Misinformation or distrust of vaccines can be like a contagion that can spread as fast as measles.”

—Theresa Tam

 

By Alex P. Vidal

 

EVEN here in New York City where most of the people are excited and waiting for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines this month until early next year, some rabid anti-vaccine fanatics have started to make a noise—annoying and irritating soundbites.

“Alex, did you watch the video about the vaccine? They (United States health authorities) want to force us to take the vaccine. They want to control our financial assets; they want to control and destroy our lives,” bewailed 68-year-old Lucita, a Filipino-American who owns a balikbayan box delivery services in Queens.

“You have to watch the video and share it. We need to save lives. We need to inform President (Rodrigo) Duterte because he doesn’t know about this. He is preparing to purchase COVID vaccines for the Philippines worth millions of pesos.”

Eric, 36, Lucita’s lover, who immigrated here from El Salvador, followed suit: “This is the link of the video (a Youtube link). Watch before they will delete it. They don’t want us to know the truth that’s why they delete all information about the danger of vaccines.”

The couple is just one of several American Doubting Thomases and a few gullible individuals from other countries who believe hook, line, and sinker that the vaccines—or the COVID-19 vaccines (now from Pfizer) being shipped to the United Kingdom—“will harm the people because they carry microchips that will monitor and control us.”

 

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They were the same characters actually who claim that “COVID-19 is a hoax meant to scare and control the populace and only President Donald Trump can save us.”

I told them—without any intention, of course, to engage them in a debate—that instead of inflicting themselves with unnecessary fears and paranoia, they should read the list of common misconceptions originally written by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) in the United States, primarily for use by practitioners giving vaccinations to children in their practices. They refused. 

Here’s an edited version of the useful information for health-care workers giving vaccination as well as concerned parents. 

The Q&A addresses the common misconceptions about vaccination that are often cited by concerned parents and believers of the pesky conspiracy theories like Lucita and Rico as reasons to question the wisdom of having their children vaccinated. 

The World Health Organization (WHO), by the way, has gratefully acknowledged the permission of CDC Atlanta to present an edited version of some of the "Six common misconceptions about immunization".

 

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Will vaccines cause harmful side effects, illnesses or even death? Could there be long term effects we don’t know about yet?

Vaccines are very safe, despite implications to the contrary in many anti-vaccine publications. 

Most vaccine adverse events are minor and temporary, such as a sore arm or mild fever. 

These can often be controlled by taking paracetamol after vaccination. More serious adverse events occur rarely (on the order of one per thousands to one per millions of doses), and some are so rare that risk cannot be accurately assessed. 

So few deaths can plausibly be attributed to vaccines that it is hard to assess the risk statistically. 

Each death reported to ministries of health is thoroughly examined to assess whether it is really related to administration of vaccine, and if so, what exactly is the cause. 

When, after careful investigation, an event is felt to be a genuine vaccine-related event, it is most frequently found to be a programmatic error, not related to vaccine manufacture.

 

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Which disease show the impact of vaccines the best?

There are many examples, including smallpox, which was eradicated worldwide in 1979 following a collaborative global vaccination programme led by the World Health Organization. 

Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people and was one of the most feared diseases for over 3000 years. Today is completely gone thanks to immunization efforts.

Another example is measles. There have been periodic peaks and valleys throughout the years, but the real, permanent drop in measles incidence coincided with the licensure and wide use of measles vaccine beginning in 1963. 

Other vaccine-preventable diseases show a roughly similar pattern in incidence, with all except hepatitis B showing a significant drop in cases corresponding with the advent of vaccine use.

What happens if countries don’t immunize against diseases?

We can look at the experiences of several developed countries after they allowed their immunization levels to drop. 

Three countries—the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Sweden and Japan—cut back the use of pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine because of fear about the vaccine. 

The effect was dramatic and immediate. In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a drop in pertussis vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100 000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978. 

In Japan at around the same time, a drop in vaccination rates from 70 percent to 20–40 percent led to a jump in pertussis from 393 cases and no deaths in 1974 to 13 000 cases and 41 deaths in 1979. 

 

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In Sweden, the annual incidence rate of pertussis per 100 000 children of 0–6 years of age increased from 700 cases in 1981 to 3200 in 1985.

There were also major epidemics of diphtheria that occurred in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, where low primary immunization rates for children and the lack of booster vaccinations for adults resulted in an increase from 839 cases in 1989 to nearly 50 000 cases and 1700 deaths in 1994. 

There were at least 20 imported cases in Europe and two cases in U.S. citizens who had worked in the former Soviet Union. 

It seems clear from these experiences that not only would diseases not be disappearing without vaccines, but if we were to stop vaccinating, they would come back.

Is it true that giving a child multiple vaccinations for different diseases at the same time increases the risk of harmful side effects and can overload the immune system?

Children are exposed to many foreign antigens every day. Eating food introduces new bacteria into the body, and numerous bacteria live in the mouth and nose, exposing the immune system to still more antigens. 

An upper respiratory viral infection exposes a child to 4–10 antigens, and a case of strep throat to 25–50. According to "Adverse events Associated with childhood vaccines", a 1994 report from the Institute of Medicine in the United States, "In the face of these normal events, it seems unlikely that the number of separate antigens contained in childhood vaccines . . . would represent an appreciable added burden on the immune system that would be immuno-suppressive."

Indeed, available scientific data show that simultaneous vaccination with multiple vaccines has no adverse effect on the normal childhood immune system. 

A number of studies and reviews have been conducted to examine the effects of giving various combinations of vaccines simultaneously. These studies have shown that the recommended vaccines are as effective in combination as they are individually, and that such combinations carry no greater risk for adverse side effects.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, is a former editor of two dailies in Iloilo, Philippines)