one of the side effects of the Dengue vaccine debacle in the Philippines, where an experimental vaccine caused a dozen children to die of complicated dengue, was distrust of vaccine: ALL vaccines.
This AlJ article discusses the aftermath: Children not getting routine vaccines dying of measles, etc.
People want cures, and when things are imperfect, don't understand the problem of cost/benefit ratio.
Do we stop giving antibiotics because a few people get severe allegy reactions? Do we stop using birth control pills because a few women had fatal blood clots? Do we stop driving cars because of the risk of auto accidents?
Various vaccines have been around for 225 years, and the question if the risk of side effects outweighed the danger of the actual disease has been around since then (or even longer: Cotton Mather got a bomb thrown at him because he argued locals should be innoculated with a case of mild smallpox (a practice used in the Ottoman empire) during the smallpox epidemic in 1721 Boston.
a similar world wide hysteria is being spread by anti vaxxers about the covid shots.
Anti science Luddites, one would be tempted to say.
But alas, in their defense, it should be noted the real problem was that the side effects were covered up, and this coverup was aided and abetted by governments who censored the news of side effects, especially of the mRNA vaccines (the adenovirus astrozeneca problems were known early, which is why in the Philippines we only gave it to the elders).
Propaganda pushed vaccines as a prevention, and China got a lot of credit by giving their vaccine to various poor countries before the western vaccines were approved of by scientisits: but quickly it was realized that Sinovax resulted in poor protection, so the western vaccines soon became sought after by locals.
But then it was noted that even the western vaccines required boosters because the immune response decreased with time.
Luckily, herd immunity from the Omicron varient has pretty well stopped the epidemic here in the Philippines: it was felt that the various vaccines gave us time to cope. And for those who said it wasn't dangerous except for the old: well, sorry but we lost young and middle age friends at the height of the epidemic. And this is why the Philippines, despite suspicion of new vaccines, had a fairly good rate of being innoculated in the first two years, but when it came to boosters, few bothered to get them.
Finally, another big scandal in the USA was the overthetop effort to stop doctors from prescribing possible alternative treatments that might or might not work. Ivermectin? Once it was shown to work it was used widely here, along with steroids and anti viral medicines for severe cases.
Sigh.
But covid is not the only vaccine where both problems and benefits were censored or else exaggerated for political reasons.
A similar fight against the anti vax propaganda involves the attempt to eradicate polio.
I am old enough to remember the polio epidemics of the 1950s: Two of my friends had it and were left with weakened legs. Then came the Salk vaccine, and we all got shots, and there have been very few cases in developed countries since then.
Little known fact:
If enough people were vaccinated, polio could be wiped out in the world, similar to how smallpox was stopped.
But alas the anti vax hysteria of the west is picked up by ignorant religious leaders (Most but not all Muslim) who read these stories and then told their people that the vaccines are poison.
This has been going on for quite awhile, before all the covid kerfuffle started.
For example, we had to cope with communist propaganda against "western" vaccines and clinics in the 1970s when I worked in Africa. Then we saw stories blaming HIV on the west, which also was a rumor started by the KGB,
This was picked up by the UK press: some Brits saw cases of HIV in areas where polio vaccine had been given in central Africa, picked up the KGB disinformation, and blamed polio vaccine for the epidemic, ignoring the fact that (serum testing showed) the virus had been there for decades, but was being spread mainly via truck drivers and prostitutes along the new pan African highway. But never mind; The anti vax hysteria gets you to feel like a hero.
Similar episodes of hysteria, people avoiding vaccines, and then diseases that docs hadn't seen for decades have occured since then, with whooping cough and now measles vaccines. The Whooping cough vaccine was replaced with a safer one, but measles kills kids, and if you give it too early, it needs boosters, but if you give it later, you get infants dead from measles. Too few experts in the west pushing the hysteria have seen these dead kids, so seem unaware of this terrible disease. As for autism: these kids were around 40 years ago, but we diagnosed them as retarded and they were institutionalized. Now the parents have to cope with them. And often when you take a history and find their symptoms were a problem present since birth, so probably from genetic defects.
Sigh.
Alas, the overhyping of covid vaccine and the censorship of side effects has exacerbated a general anti vax hysteria, and ignorant people just don't see the difference between one vaccine and another completely different vaccine, and often are clueless that these childhood diseases kill children.
Well, anyway, the pro/anti vax propaganda wars over the last 20 years has waxed and waned.
However the publicity given to these ideas has led to an upsurge of anti polio vaccine ideas in Muslim countries. This has been a major cause of it's spread,
To to make things worse, the mutation of the OPV virus into unvaccinated population caused several small epidemics.
This resulted in more suspicion of vaccine, and so a successful and easily given oral vaccine has had to be replaced with an expensive injection, requiring training in giving shots, expenses for disposable syringes (so not to spread HIV), etc.
Stratagy page mentions the problems with polio vaccine in their essay on Nigeria's problems.
In 2020 the government had prematurely declared Nigeria polio free. Because of poor reporting by health officials in several states, it turned out that Nigeria had not been eradicated. This comes after three years with no known new cases of polio.
actually no: there were cases, but they just weren't being resported.
In those two nations (Afghanistan and Pakistan) the same Moslem intolerance and paranoia that delayed Nigeria from becoming polio-free are in play....
This polio free effort began in the 1980s and a decade ago ran into problems in northern Nigeria, where conservative Islamic clergy and Boko Haram spread the rumor that the polio vaccine was actually a plot to poison Moslem children. This has delayed eradication of polio in Nigeria for nearly a decade.
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria all share the same problems of poor public health care systems and some lingering resistance to vaccination preached by a few hardcore Moslem preachers. As long as these three nations still have some polio infections it is possible for migrants, especially illegals, to take the virus to virus-free nations.
It's not just Muslim preachers: Catholic bishops in one African country opposed giving tetanus vaccine to pregnant women because it contained "HCG" which supposedly caused miscarriages or stopped women from becoming pregnant.
This same rumor was being spread back in the 1990s in the Philippines, so it's not a new claim.
And naive westerners wondered why pregnant women needed a course of anti tetanus vaccine,
Uh, neonatal tetanus:
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Sigh.
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