Baby dies of whooping cough. Concerns about vaccine hesitancy.

[flyingsquirrelsagogo]

Article on the the BBC website today. It’s so sad.
Vaccines are probably the most important public health measure ever introduced. But they’ve been so successful that people forget how awful things were before we had them and how deadly the diseases were.

Baby dies of whooping cough after mother not vaccinated while pregnant https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2xe5l4mn5o

Unfortunately I think that it will take a lot of children dying or being left disabled before these vaccines are the work of the devil parents will change their minds.

When I say “we don’t remember” I mean as a generation. These awful diseases were eradicated (mostly) so we don’t see the effects on child mortality and morbidity in our day to day lives.

That is not the most effective comms strategy though. Vaccine take up is dreadful, the NHS needs to be approaching this the way any other organisation would think about user engagement.

Oh and incidentally my borough has one of the worst take up rates in the country. Vaccines aren’t offered at routine midwife appointments and neither the hospital or community midwives mention pharmacies as an option. Connection maybe?

And yes for people concerned, my son has had everything since. (Including basics like err, a midwife visiting us at home after discharge, which unbelievably I had to advocate for and escalate through other channels because the aforementioned hospital fucked up the paperwork.)

They played a clip of a child with whooping cough on radio 4 news earlier today. If this article here and the terrible sound of the child coughing like that doesn’t prompt you to get vaccinated asap then God help your child for having a selfish and neglectful parent.

What do you mean by “bullying”?
This sounds like outreach / proactive care. What do you see as bullying?

And yet another poster called a more proactive post “bullying”. So what should they do?

Couldn't agree more

I think it's a real problem with how a lot of NHS services are organised. When things appear haphazard to the patients then it can also appear unimportant. It's going to be more difficult to convince patients to take up important services when there isn't a consistent timetable of when they are available or if appointments are often cancelled.

Well I would call:

• announcing women's names from her list (we were all the in the GD test clinic)
• asking them loudly if they'd had the vaccine
• asking them follow up questions about their "reasons for refusing the vaccine"
• stating that they "needed to record the reason for refusal"

Bullying.

I already had the vaccine, and I didn't appreciate the fact that a) the woman responsible had no record and b) she was making my special category health data available in this fashion.

A useless strategy anyway, as she didn't convince anyone to take the vaccine who hadn't already had it.

I wonder if this varies by trust - in my pregnancies over the last few years I've always had them through my GP. The midwife told me once I was eligible and chased up to make sure I'd done it. I think I also received a message from my GP too.

And then we’d probably have people saying it’s against their human rights to force people to vaccinate their children, and the human rights lawyers would be rubbing their hands in glee….

Very sad.

I grew up pre-vaccine and I caught whooping cough as a young child. I remember being unable to stop coughing, just looping in a seemingly never ending cough.

I remember the GP coming to visit me, and I remember my mum being very worried and with me all the time. I remember her begging me to just try to stop coughing.

It’s an absolutely horrible disease. Poor little baby, to die from such a thing.

I am in my 50s and having whooping cough aged 4 is probably my earliest memory. I don't remember much before about the age of 7, but I do remember standing at the bottom of the stairs whooping and coughing. According to my somewhat unreliable parent, I had actually been vaccinated but managed to get a light dose of whooping cough anyway. No one else I've ever known has had it - I assumed it was pretty rare these days.

It really is awful that vaccination rates have fallen so low. Some of it is parental ignorance, some of it is wilful choice, some of it is down to the government/NHS not putting more resources into a really stringent campaign to make people more aware, so that even those who are normally oblivious can't miss the information and no one has to go looking for it.

My children are young adults now and are vaccinated up to the eyeballs.

It's always tragic when a baby dies from something easily preventable. If the mother turned down the vaccine, hopefully she will be prosecuted for manslaughter. There needs to be a message sent to the anti-vax morons.

We shouldn’t even be in the situation where there are deaths from measles or whooping cough
it’s like we are going backwards to the time when there were no vaccines except now they’re free and available and people are refusing them

I've just answered how it was bullying (as well as a data breach), but I never said that the "proactive" method was good in the first place.

That poster, myself and many others I know struggled to get the advertised service of drop ins (which would be valuable to those covertly going against their community).

Did you not take one up at the hospital antenatal department when/where you went for a scan?

I had whooping cough when I was about 9. I still remember how ill I was. I got in my parents’ bed at night as the coughing was so bad. It was the school holidays - I’d caught it off another boy on holiday.
My dad didn’t believe in vaccines.

That’s quite a low threshold for ‘bullying’

Unfortunately I think this needs to happen. These diseases never went away and people have become complacent. Maybe it will be the shock that some need to make appts and get their dc up to date with vaccines. Terrible that it has to be this way no child should lose their life to preventable illnesses in 2025

Well I witnessed it, I saw the embarrassment of the women involved, and it's my job to design processes that a) are compliant with data protection law (this absolutely wasn't) and b) support people with accessing healthcare. And "loudly blabbing out people's details in a public space" weirdly doesn't make the list.

But we all have our opinions.

Yes, I had it too (in the 1960s).

Just in case anyone on this thread believes the MMR nonsense, here's a perfect summary of it. I save it and repost it whenever I can because this kind of disinformation is criminally dangerous.

https://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

My daughter caught whooping cough last year. She’s fully vaccinated.
Doc didn’t think she had it for this reason, but her test came back positive.
It was horrific. The sound of her coughing and struggling to breathe over and over was the worst thing I’ve heard. She’d be bright red in the face, vomiting from coughing so much.
I’ll never forget the night she woke up coughing, struggling to breathe then complete silence. I’ve never got out of bed so fast, convinced she’d stopped breathing. It was absolutely awful.

Her cough lasted around 4 months, she still has to have a blue inhaler every now and then as she complains of a tight chest, something which never happened before whooping cough.

I remember seeing a segment on the news of parents saying they hadn’t vaccinated their children against whooping cough but would get if their child started coughing 🙄 , to me these people are the reason my daughter was ill with it. It’s an illness that’s preventable. Why wouldn’t you get your child vaccinated?!!

I agree that approach was very heavy handed and really not best practice.

I am interested in what approaches you think will help.
Surely we need to be “proactive”. But how?

Edited my post above to include the correct link, not the one to Bob the Vampire 🤣🤣🤣