It began with an innocent question posted on the online medical forum Doctissimo: “Hello, I’m looking for info about vaccinations for babies. I have a four-month old girl who I haven’t had vaccinated yet because I’ve read lots of articles and books about the damaging effects of vaccines (cancers in the long term, neurological problems, etc.).” But the author of the post, Lunaya78, rapidly shifted into attack mode, criticising the power of pharmas, doctors’ lack of transparency and the serious side effects experienced by vaccinated children.

She was quickly joined by another user, who posted a link to a support march for Stacy, a Belgian baby who died of meningococcal meningitis ten days after being vaccinated. On Youtube, the activist Alvin Jackson passionately rants about vaccination requirements for children, comparing them to genocide.

“The huge majority of parents support immunisations, but a small minority, very active in the media and online, is opposed to it,” says Pierre-Alex Crisinel, staff physician with the Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology Unit at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). The opponents mainly cite the dangers of vaccines, which have been denounced as the cause of a string of diseases from autism to multiple sclerosis, allergies, diabetes and epilepsy.

Some parents, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, believe that we should let children develop these childhood diseases to boost their immune system. “There has been a deep change in the perception of risks,” says Claire-Anne Siegrist, Director of the Centre for Vaccinology at the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) and senior physician of General Paediatrics. “People are no longer afraid of the diseases that the vaccines prevent, and so they wonder if they’re of any use at all.”

Some people oppose vaccinations for religious reasons, while others claim the right to choose freely which medicines they give to their children, decrying the immunisation requirements in France and the United States. “Laws are less strict in Switzerland,” says Pierre-Alex Crisinel. “Only the cantons of Geneva and Neuchâtel impose mandatory vaccination against diphtheria. And the new law on epidemics will do away with that require- ment in 2016.”

It’s not just parents who mistrust vaccines. Pierre Verger, an epidemiologist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), studied the attitude of 1,712 French general practitioners towards vaccines. “Between 15% and 40% never or only rarely recommend some vaccines,” the scientist says. In fact, one quarter of them feel that we immunise our children too much. “They are the most suspicious of the vaccines that have caused public controversy, such as hepatitis B and papillomavirus.”

Pierre Verger also noted in some practitioners, especially older ones, “a form of defiance” against recommendations from the authorities. For example, the meningococcal C vaccination is considered unnecessary due to the rarity of the disease. Homeopaths, chiropractors and naturopaths are even more reluctant and sometimes hostile towards any practice that contradicts their own doctrine of treating people with plants or back exercises.

UNFOUNDED FEARS

This backlash is for the most part unfounded, according to Claire-Anne Siegrist from HUG. “Vaccines with significant harmful side effects never reach the market, and those that furthermore disproved anti-vaccine fears.

Vaccines with significant harmful side effects never reach the market.

“As vaccines are administered on a large scale, people tend to accuse them of triggering all the diseases that this vast group of patients would have developed anyway,” says Bernard Vaudaux, former head of the Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology Unit at CHUV.

The frequent changes in the recommended immunisation schedule also lead to confusion. “Some vaccines, such as smallpox and tuberculosis, were dropped because those diseases have disappeared from the indigenous Swiss population,” Bernard Vaudaux says. Other vaccines have been replaced with a new, more effective version, including the vaccine against pneumococcal infections. Certain immunisations are now administered less frequently. For example, tetanus and diphtheria booster shots protect people for longer than expected, so fewer inoculations are necessary between the ages of 25 and 45.

Some caution should nevertheless be taken with vaccines. They can be fatal for people with a deficient immune system – especially the elderly, newborns that cannot be immunised before the age of 1, and HIV patients with poor protection from antibodies. However, in theory, these people benefit from the “herd effect”, which is to say the invisible wall that is created between them and the disease, because they live within an immunised population.

Several European countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, suffered measles outbreaks in the early 2000s, resulting from a drop in the vaccinated population following the MMR vaccine scare (see p. 41). The United States recorded nearly 1,000 measles cases between 2013 and 2015. More serious yet, Nigeria and Pakistan have recently faced a resurgence of polio, a disease that had been virtually eradicated, due to the religious authorities’ mistrust of the vaccine. They wrongly accused it of containing pork, which is forbidden in Islam, or of causing sterility as part of a western conspiracy to make Muslim women infertile. ⁄