Parents choosing not to vaccinate their children

[MidnightPatrol]

A child has died in Liverpool as part of an outbreak of measles. 17 are currently hospitalised with it in the city, as part of a wider outbreak.

73% of children in Liverpool are vaccinated against measles - vs an England average of 84%.

A rate of 95% immunisation is required for herd immunity. No child in the UK needs to be getting measles - we can vaccinate against it.

In Liverpool, there is a risk of a widespread measles outbreak due to this low rate of immunisation - it is very infectious, so the risk to the population is significant.

If you are a parent that doesn’t get your child vaccinated, why?

Should the government not be using further incentives to encourage people to take up vaccination - are a third of Liverpudlians really against vaccinating their children?

Should non-vaccinated children be limited from accessing nursery or schools (as in other countries)?

Is there evidence of having three vaccinations simultaneously overloading a child and causing medical issues?

I haven’t heard of that - they’re given together because it’s safe to do so.

In your example with your husband, that sounds as though they were given multiple separate vaccines (ie not tested to be given together and supposed to be administered in that way?)

I agree to a point, that antiVax parents need to be seen by someone (? Community paed) to directly tackle their concerns, as is usually misinformation. But, we should also protect vulnerable too, and exclude those who choose to not vaccinate from nurseries and schools. some will only begrudgingly vaccinate their kids, that’s also fine.

DD is currently doing hospital placements in Liverpool and I can confirm what @MidnightPatrol is saying.

She attended a talk about the low take up of vaccines and screening in Liverpool relative to the rest of the country.

Why??
Don't you think if there were risks to vaccines being given at once they wouldn't do it? There are so many vaccine doubts that are nothing more than just people's uneducated instinct.

@Birdyfrom yellow fever vaccine is live, and known to cause side effects. Kids are not being offered Yellow fever as part of their schedule.

That man has so much to answer for when he meets St Peter at the pearly gates. He seems to have become a celebrity in America, does speaking tours and such. No-one there seems to have any idea that his “research” was discredited to the point of him actually being struck off.

“It’s so incredibly frustrating that a century of work to eradicate these illnesses is now being reversed because science and medicine are suddenly seen as bad words.”

I don’t think they’re being seen as bad words as such, more that science and medicine can be very arrogant and inaccessible. It’s like a “I’m very clever and you’re not” approach. Which pushes people away.

How many nowadays, particularly women, are fobbed off at the drs? Medical misogyny is a big problem for many women. Medical gaslighting is rife. Most of us know what that feels like. Not being taken seriously makes us doubt everyone involved in our care.

For whatever reason not everyone is happy to believe the very basic info we’re given about vaccines, so many will go looking for their own and find other similarly scared people.

Those researching and developing vaccines have a responsibility to be accessible, transparent, and present their findings in ways that most people can understand, or at least have accessible documents alongside. This would prevent so many of the anti vaxx opinions, and would very easily and clearly debunk the anti vaxx documents and evidence that float around the internet. If they can’t/won’t do that then of course it leads people to believe that they’re hiding something.

The days of “I’m a scientist/doctor therefore you need to believe me” have long gone. These orgs need to adapt to the realities of this world.

There are still threads now started about the MMR, on here. This was way way before Covid.

I think the Government needs to take action and exclude unvaccinated children (excluding genuine medical reasons etc) from schools and nurseries. Why give free nursery hours to unvaccinated children. Some parents are not vaccinating due to information they see online, or like on here, worried about the 3 in 1. It’s madness.

How are you going to feel if your child is in the morgue because you took a decision not to vaccinate. That’s going to be very hard to live with. Do parents not realise how serious it can be. I hope that making this death public, parents in Liverpool will do the right thing and get the vaccine.

I think there are various factors at play and there needs to be multiple ways to tackle vaccination uptake. I know a fair few anti vaxers(I home ed), mostly they have distrust in the government and medicine as a whole, preferring natural remedies, these people have always existed, saying no access to school etc wouldn’t impact them.
Then you have people who are becoming more uncertain since COVID with the help of social media which like it or not many people are massively influenced by and get all of their information from and take things as facts. I’ve seen posts about Andrew Wakefield shared and the comments are full of people who just believe the post without doing any research of their own.
Then there are cultural reasons for not vaccinating , some areas have lower intake due to the cultural make up of the area. This was a thing in my area during covid and is also the same with childhood vaccinations.

In what way are the developers of childhood vaccines not being open and transparent about them?

I think your average vaccine-questioning parent isn’t going to have the knowledge to understand the detail of the science.

The issue of people seeing TikToks or Facebook posts with incorrect information and just believing it to be factual is harder to resolve - how do you tackle lack of critical thinking? Vaccine refusal is only one such area where we see this - people ignoring the facts in favour of nonsense they see online because their mates mum shared it.

There is no secrecy around childhood vaccines, I find the suggestion there is quite bizarre. Thousands of studies have been done.

I take advice from subject matter experts. If my dog needs treatment, we visit the vet. If a need legal advice, I see a lawyer. If my car isn’t working properly, I see the mechanic.
If I need a potentially life saving vaccine supported by doctors and virologists, I go and get the shot. I don’t listen to anti vaxxers or YouTube so called experts.

Interestingly from the moment the first vaccine was introduced (for smallpox) there was anti vaxxers.

definitely not some covid thing.

children used to be not named until they had survived small pox because so many died from it.

Absolutely - I don’t want to live in a communist country but if you want to endanger vulnerable groups you can do so on the fringes of society and home school.

Yes I know. My oldest was a baby around that time, and there was so much fear around vaccines.

Mine are all vaccinated. I was not as I was a sickly child and my gp didn’t advise it.

At that time antivaxxers were treated badly. Had they been presented with clear and easy to understand evidence, which surely must have been available, it all could have gone away.
Andrew Wakefield went on to still present his evidence, in his Vaxxed film, in talks across many countries - if all his work was debunked clearly and transparently then there would be no room at all for his talks. Whatever action was taken sadly didn’t do the trick, but iirc it was an approach of “we’ve done the science, don’t worry, vaccines are safe” with a perceptible eye roll aimed at the “idiots” questioning it all. Yet at the same time Tony Blair refused to say whether his son Leo had received the MMR which fed the whole thing more.

It’s a mess, but sadly it’s not just a mess made by antivaxxers. Science has played a big role by treating people as idiots who cannot possibly understand, and not done their part by providing clear results and evidence, which has led many to believe that there is no evidence that vaccines are safe. It’s known human psychology that people become what you treat them as. They’re reaping what they’ve sown.

Obviously this is terrible for unvaccinated children. It’s fixable, but change needs to come from the top. They need to change their approach to this, particularly as their approach has contributed to it.

I live in the Midlands and we had an outbreak a year or so ago. Alongside children they were asking adults if a certain age to check their vaccine status. I am of the age where I was only given one dose. I queried it as I live with an adult who is immunosuppressed. I was in the following day being jabbed with another dose. They honestly weren't taking the risk. They said even despite the drive on social media, on the radio stations and in doctors surgeries they weren't getting a good enough uptake.

This is exactly it, isnt it?

I am a skilled professional- in my field. If I am intelligent but I am not skilled in another field and if I want advise in a different area I would see another professional!

My children have had all their vaccines but I didn't follow the nhs schedule as I was concerned about overloading. So i booked seperate appointments for each one. The GP surgery and vaccination staff were understanding. The way the NHS schedule is set up is about cost saving more than anything. People with concerns about overloading young children should know they can space them out.

If they just took the initiative to ask rather than just go to the other extreme. Sounds a sensible approach.

I’ve worked a lot in the last few years, in the social media misinformation/disinformation space, trying to work out how the hell to combat it.

The issue is, the arguments for the truth are often quite nuanced and require a certain level of knowledge, training, experience and understanding to grasp fully. The info can be provided, but not usually in a quickly and easily understandable form.

With mis/disinformation though, it’s often complete inaccuracies that are nicely packaged with a clear narrative that people can swiftly grasp in a 90 second video.

Add that to a growing feeling that governments/establishment bodies aren’t there to look after you or have your best interests at heart (which is completely understandable in a rapidly destabilising world, a cost of living crisis, following a poorly-managed global pandemic and an ongoing series of fuckwittery at the top of most governments), and you have a recipe for disaster.

I’m third trimester and actually got hold of my GP the day I turned 28 weeks to ask for an RSV vaccine appointment 😂 Like, give my baby and I ALL the good stuff please! You can’t predict a side-effect if you do give them to your child but you absolutely can predict a resurgence in dangerous diseases if you don’t.

(edited a typo)

I read a study on this recently. The main barriers to vaccination are really prosaic things: not being able to get a GP appointment; not being able to get to a GP appointment (the vaccination teams should probably go out to nurseries?); not being sure which jabs your child has or hasn't had and when they're due.

Yes, I agree.

Sadly the information from scientists and researchers can be difficult to interpret.
I can read scientific documents, but many can’t.

For whatever reason some people are scared of vaccines. There should be clearer documents available that more people can understand, and the documents whizzing round showing that they’re dangerous should be clearly debunked.

People are different. Covid proved that. Some were very happy to follow the rules, some weren’t. You’re never going to improve this situation by doing the same things over and over again, and at this point it’s clear that a lot of people have lost faith in medicine and science, so if the same approach is taken again it’s not going to work. Calling people stupid for having, in their eyes, a valid fear of vaccinations, is not going to win them over, we’ve seen this many times now.

Exactly. in the 70s, when 2 of my chidlren were born, there was a huge "scare" about the whooping cough vaccine - entirely unfounded of course - and I did not take this vaccine up for them. And my husband was a young doctor at the time......... he had never seen a case of whooping cough precisely because of the success of the vaccine so he did not insist they had it.

One of them caught it. As soon as we knew then he gave the other erythromycin which can be effective in the very early stages, as it thankfully was for us. But the DD who caught it - she was flattened by it - she coughed and coughed and heaved up cupfuls of plasticine-consistency phlegm every hour. This lasted for weeks and weeks. And a year later she could not run without coughing up phlegm. She is a grown adult with children of her own now and her life has been plagued with over-production of phlegm and cough. All since the whooping cough.

It was the worst decision I ever made.

Measles is a similarly serious illness that can have lifetime consequences.

Get your children vaccinated! - we are so so lucky to have this means of keeping our children well. Do not look a gift horse in the mouth.

I forgot one D nephew isn't vaccinated against measles.
I remember the conversation with SIL MIL around Melinda Messenger, when I was pregnant
I was adamant that DD would be having it. As above knowing a local child, left with brain damage after measles for 2 years before dying was enough for me.

But isn’t the point here that we don’t need to be able to interpret the scientific documents - we have scientists and doctors to do that for us.

Just as I don’t need to know how my car engine works because we have mechanics for that. And I don’t need to learn all the law on the statute books because should I need to I can hire a lawyer.

We may be interested in knowing more about things, but unless we actually spend a decade studying a subject surely to some extent we should be deferring to the people who have?