It was with deep concern and not without some amount of embarrassment that I read the news of how in many Northern parts of Kerala - and yes, my own hometown too figures in that list -
parents were refusing to give their children the MMR vaccines. As per the state health minister Shylaja Teacher, only around 58% of the children have been given their doses as of the cut-off date, forcing them to extend the deadline.
It would seem absurd that in 2017, we are still discussing whether to give vaccines even after so many decades of viewing its success across the world. And yet,
the lobby to brainwash people and play to their inner insecurities has been doing an increasingly stellar job in seeding fear into the minds of the gullible and unsure, undoing decades of work by health care workers and scientists.
They have given half a dozen theories and reasons as to why no parent should consider giving the vaccine to their children. I want to deal with these myths circulating around against vaccinations.
Vaccinations are part of a USA / Zionist agenda to sterilize Muslim women and lower life-expectancy.
This story has been circulating
for a decade and more now, invariably by conservative minds and alternative health practitioners. The simple fact is that there is zero evidence to back this theory. Except for playing to your inner fears, it is nothing more.
The vaccines are not changed based on religion and are given to every child who comes to a hospital to get them. The stories circulating in Kerala are far-fetched enough to suggest that Bill Gates (they actually accuse him directly) has amassed all his infinite dollars from Microsoft with the sole agenda of making women in Kerala infertile. All I can say is it takes a very fertile imagination to cook up such stories. And sadly, a real fear within to believe them.
But evidence? None, in two decades of rumour-mongering.
There is so much being said both for and against vaccination. So for now, I choose not to give my child the vaccine.
This dialogue makes my blood boil. In essence - You're electively choosing to let your child surely get a disease because you aren't sure of the efficacy of vaccines in spite of a 99% drop in incidence of the disease after vaccination and zero proven studies suggesting vaccines affect fertility or cause autism (I will discuss the infamous Wakefield study shortly).
What is worse - you are harming children around you as well.
Diseases will come whether you get vaccinated or not. So why take vaccinations?
Diseases may surely come but NOT THESE DISEASES. Try to understand. We are lucky to have vaccines for these diseases. When the majority of a population is immunized, the chance of an outbreak of these diseases is nil. Whereas,
AS IS CLEARLY SEEN LAST YEAR, when there were deaths due to diphtheria in Kerala, the disease rises again when the area is not immunized. So don't kill your child because of apathy.
Children have died after vaccination.
As far as I have checked, I have not found an incident of a spurious batch of vaccines that caused mass deaths in India. To say one or two children had an adverse reaction to a vaccine, I (and any sane doctor) will surely agree with you. It is entirely possible to have such reactions to any drug which is also why it is best to be given by a doctor who can identify and treat an allergic reaction.
But for this 0.001% incidence, to put your child at 99.99% risk of getting measles or rubella is insane. You have a greater chance of getting hit by a falling coconut while walking down a Kerala street.
Vaccinations cause autism.
No, it does not. Extensive studies have been done across the world to test this claim and it is clearly proven that
there is no link between vaccination and autism.
What happened before vaccines were there for diseases like measles, rubella etc?
Before there were vaccines, nearly everyone would get infected by diseases like measles. Of this, hundreds died every year based on their immunity. A rubella outbreak in 1964-65 infected 12.5 million Americans, caused 11,000 miscarriages and killed 2000 babies. In comparison, from 2012 till today, only 15 cases of rubella have ever been detected in USA.
The reason why
ONLY 2 LAKH Indians die every year of Tuberculosis instead of 2 crore is because we have received a strong starter-pack immunity from it due to vaccination.
You may have the tuberculosis bacilli in you right now as you read this (1 in 3 Indians do) but because of that vaccination you got when you were small, you neither are sick nor contagious.
So why vaccinate for a disease that is almost gone?
This is important so please try to understand. A person who is not vaccinated can still carry the disease and spread it- he is still contagious. Whereas a vaccinated child cannot spread that disease as his body already knows to defend itself against this. The more vaccinated people you are surrounded by, the lesser chance of you being infected.
Image courtesy: CDC - How vaccines protect you Blue: non vaccinated, healthy
Yellow: Vaccinated, healthy
Red: Non-vaccinated, contagious
This matters because there is a very vulnerable period after birth till the infant gets vaccinated at around 12 months. The child has no defenses against measles or rubella during this period and is at great risk if surrounded by plenty of people and children who have not been vaccinated too.
Vaccines don't just defend your child. They help defend a class, a family, a community. They help isolate the disease further and further until hopefully a generation from now, we can totally eradicate the diseases. We have done it already with small pox and are so close with polio.
Is this Anti-vaxxers phenomena localized to this pocket of Kerala?
Unfortunately not. There may be
kilometers and kilometers between Washington DC and Miami beach but thanks to social media, ignorance is linked from America to Alapuzha. There is one physician behind it all, a Mr Andrew Wakefield, whose fake article in 1998 is the root cause of the myths we suffer today. And it is affecting children from skeptical communities not just in North Kerala but across the world. Between 2001-2015 (after Wakefield's article was published),
1789 cases of measles were detected in USA, a dramatic increase from the past. Of this, nearly 70% were found to be unvaccinated.
Who is Andrew Wakefield?
In 1998, physician Andrew Wakefield published a study suggesting that the MMR vaccine caused developmental disorders in children. This received wide press and caused panic amongst parents across the world leading to a decline in immunization and subsequent increase in outbreaks.
So what was wrong with what he said? Just about everything.
Wakefield's study (now retracted as
you can see here) had a insanely small number of patients (12), was an uncontrolled study and absolutely speculative. His methods were inappropriate, giving money to children at his son's birthday party and taking their blood without consent and there was no medical review board to monitor the conditions.
Oh yes, I forgot two other things - he forgot to inform the medical board that he was being paid $55,000 to advise lawyers on how to showcase that vaccines harmed children AND he forgot to disclose that he had filed a patent for a vaccine of his own TO COMPETE with the MMR vaccine.
Multiple subsequent studies found no link as suggested by Wakefield. Soon, 10 of his 12 co-authors backed off from the article, accepting there was no real link established and implying that the results were deliberately falsified by Wakefield. Wakefield was found guilty of serious medical misconduct and lost his medical license. But the damage has been done - children across the world still die today because of the misconceptions fed two decades ago by an unscrupulous doctor. To quote directly from a
journal review,
'the Wakefield fraud is likely to go down as one of the most serious frauds in medical history.'
Why parents of vaccinated kids need to be more active in this debate
The conversation is invariably between health workers and anti-vaxxers/ parents who are skeptical. I put forward that this needs to change. Parents who have immunized their children need to step up and join this conversation, supporting healthcare workers. This directly affects your children, after all.
Surrounded by children who are not immunized, they are likely to be vulnerable during an outbreak if their own immunity is weak during that period (and in today's world - a strong immunity should never be taken for granted.) And that would be the unkindest cut of them all, would it not - you doing everything by the book and getting all the vaccines taken but then watching your child unable to breathe and end up dying in an ICU because the others in the neighbourhood decided that this was an evil scheme by Bill and Melinda Gates who earned billions worldwide and then decided to target Malappuram, of all places, in the world.
You want me to be controversial?
'You want ABC-caste free localities. You want XYZ-religion free neighbourhoods. No non-vegetarian communities.' Let us be absolutely clear. All the above three are purely based on prejudices in your mind. Smelling fish being cooked will not kill a vegetarian. An Albert or Abdullah living beside a Shankaran Nambhoothiri will not harm your family's belief in God.
But having 20 un-vaccinated children living alongside your vaccinated child guarantees that your child is at a huge risk of getting infected with a disease that can kill him or her.
I'll gladly be controversial if it will force you to come out and take a stand (heaven knows
I've done it before and sparked an international debate) - if I were living in such a community, I would ask my children to stay away from those who are not vaccinated. I would bring it up at neighbourhood meetings and demand action be taken to evict the parents if they continue to deliberately put my child at risk of death because of their blind, unscientific beliefs.
In 2016, there were
2 deaths and 20 cases of diphtheria in Kerala - the most in the state EVER - once more in these same North Kerala areas, due to negative propaganda by Kerala's anti-vaxxers. Diphtheria, a disease for which there has been a vaccine for decades which has successfully helped reduce the burden by over 99% across the world.
Come on, Kerala. Do not succumb to ignorance.
Stop listening to idiots and vaccinate your children.
