Been there, done that.
Read it and weep.
several points to bring up:
One, vaccines deteriorate if not kept cool. This can be a problem when electricity is intermittant.
the bad news?
this means that the vaccine might not give full protection, which will lower people's trust in the vaccine...the good news? in my experience, it probably means your kid will only get sick and not die.
Two: War makes people flee, so a lot of kids don't get all their shots, so have only partial immunity.
so when the kid gets sick, the parents figure the shot didn't work so might start believing what their mullahs or bishops (!) parrot to them after these leaders read the anti vax nonsense in the western press.
this is important, for in the case of oral polio vaccine, means that if the one in ten thousand cases where the attenuated virus mutates back to a virulent form, you might end up with a minor polio epidemic among the unvaccinated population.
The anti vax types make a big thing of this, but we are talking about maybe 300 cases instead of ten thousand cases.
True, there is a "safer" alternative, which is what is done in richer countries: go back to using the shot.
The polio shot is a dead virus and doesn't have that problem, but it also means a higher expense for countries whose budget is very very limited and who lack personnel to give shots.
Three: children don't just die of measles, but die afterward because after having measles they have lowered immunity to other diseases. When I worked in Africa, we had many cases because the vaccine was just being released at that time.
We would see babies who survived measles die a week or two after measles of croup or broncheolitis or pneumonia, or a month later from tuberculosis. And many children with borderline malnutrition would end up with full blown kwashiorkor after a bout with measles.
Four: in the area the article discusses, over 7000 children have died, but world wide, the number is still over 100 thousand deaths a year. This is better than in the past,
but the bad news is that last year the number of cases started going up again, and alas with Covid making ordinary folks avoid clinics, I suspect we will have a major epidemic in the near future in many countries.
Contributing to this: The anti vax fad, often promoted by rich first world types who never saw babies die of this disease, and who often are inspired by propaganda similar to the anti vax lies spread by the KGB in the past to discredit western vaccination programs.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s the rumor was that whooping cough vaccine caused brian damage, so parents stopped letting their kids get it. So instead of a few cases of post pertussis injection encephalitisThis cause thousand of cases of the disease in the UK, plus several hundreds who died or got brain damage from the actual disease... then a safer vaccine was found, and the hysteria wenr to the preservative used. When this was removed, the hysteria went to measles.
Then we in Africa, and in the Philippines in the 1990s we had to contend with the rumor that the tetanus vaccine we gave to pregnant women (to prevent neonatal tetanus) was given to them to cause a miscarriage.
Did you ever see a baby die of tetanus? It's not pretty.
Anti vaccine hysteria is not new..the vegetarian British elite pushed this idea in the early 1900s against smallpox. I wonder how many slum kids in the UK died from their hubrid. One would think that the disappearance of these diseases would put a stop to this nonsense, but in recent years it has gotten worse, and much of the blame goes to the remnants of the KGB propaganda network.
This 2019 article at Foreign policy describes how it was done. Newsweek article from 2018 discusses that this type of propaganda is, alas, still going on..
Why is Russia still allowing such dangerous propaganda to be spread by their minions? 2018 article in Science magazine notes:
..Why would Russian propaganda accounts be anti-vaccination, then? Well, not all of them were. And that’s the key point: some of these accounts tweeted out anti-vaccine lines, while others tweeted aggressively pro-vaccination ones (stuff like “You can’t fix stupidity. Let them die from measles“) These messages were deliberately sent into the discussions where they would cause the most argument and sow the most doubt and confusion.
It’s not that the Russian troll factories were pro-vax or anti-vax: they were pro-discord.
This sort of thing should not surprise anyone who knows about the history of propaganda techniques. It’s just that social media platforms like Twitter allow these strategies to be run far more efficiently and quickly. There were, for example, rumors during the 1980s that HIV was some sort of nefarious biowarfare agent that had escaped from a US facility. And these were amplified by the (then) KGB.
and of course, with covid, things have gotten worse.
and of course, the competition to "win" the race for a vaccine means that this disinformation will taint the US (fully tested) vaccine, so that Russia (and China) can then offer their (partially tested) vaccines as a better alternative.
the WHO, who dropped the ball on Covid lost a lot of credibility for believing Chinese authorities, but the dirty little secret is that their activity along with the help of many church and secular NGO's has saved literally millions of lives from infectious diseases over the last 50 years.
take measles:
In 1980, 2.6 million people died of it, and in 1990, 545,000 died; by 2014, global vaccination programs had reduced the number of deaths from measles to 73,000
but with the anti vax movement, that number is expected to soar as fewer children get the shot.
The anti vax types stress the death rate of measles is low, so why vaccinate? They use the same argument for not getting a shot against covid, which has a similar death rate:
for example, in measles:
The risk of death among those infected is about 0.2%, but may be up to 10% in people with malnutrition. Most of those who die from the infection are less than five years old.
the "elephant in the room"? Co morbidity. Not everyone is equally healthy.
In covid, the death rate is much higher in those who have health problems. And in the third world, that includes a lot of people of working age who due to the shutdown are becoming malnourished.
In the third world, the death rate from the Covid virus isn't much worse than the death rate from other diseases such as simple diarrhea or Dengue fever: But the economic effects of a shut down are horrendous, and so there is a race to get a vaccine to protect workers so the economy can be reopened.
No comments:
Post a Comment