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Vaccines have eradicated dangerous diseases and prevented epidemics. However, to promote vaccination and achieve herd immunity, much of the relevant information remains silenced. Statistics indicate that certain vaccines can cause irreversible damage in a small number of cases. But what would happen if your child was the case within that tiny amount? If informed consent is an unquestionable part of medical ethics, why is certain data regarding vaccines being overlooked? Do you know what vaccines are made of, how they are preserved and what substances are used as adjuvants? Do you know what conditions can trigger severe post-vaccination damage? The issue exceeds the dichotomy of Public Health versus individual rights, or pro-vaccines versus anti-vaccines, and encompasses important economic and political variables. Since the figures show that the vaccine segment is one of the most profitable in the pharmaceutical business, it should be remembered that vaccination is a medical intervention and of course can prevent diseases, but it also has the potential to harm.
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Controversies for and against
Vaccines have been at the center of debates for at least a couple of decades, although they were questioned and rejected already from their first versions. The dominant public health narrative focuses on the fact that vaccines have eradicated diseases that devastated entire populations, such as smallpox or, closer in time, polio, and that annually save between 2 and 3 million lives. But this vision contrasts with that of individual rights, the right to be informed and to choose what treatment or vaccine we or our children will receive. Vaccines are imposed in the countries, by law and mandatory or recommended vaccination schedules, and it seems that any experience or opinion contrary to this line can only be discredited for not having a scientific evidence base or for simply being contrary to the common good.
According to the WHO, vaccine hesitancy is one of the 10 most important threats to global health. It is a complex and delicate subject, with many interests at stake. The narrative installed in the media, in presidents and legislators, in the medical community and in society as a whole, says that vaccines are “on the side of good”. As we will see later “the vaccines” are many, they are different, they work in different ways and they also generate a wide range of side-effects. But in the totalizing narrative that places vaccines on the side of good, all question, opinion or suspicion is immediately taken to the evil side: “anti-vaccines”. In this scenario, parents who have seen their children lose eye contact or the ability to express themselves after receiving a dose of MMR vaccine, girls who fainted or convulsed after receiving a dose of the HPV vaccine, doctors who are suspicious about vaccines recently added to the mandatory schedule, who denounce the lobby of the pharmaceutical industries and the fabulous business of a vaccine being approved, or simply all those who demand that they should be informed of all possible adverse reactions and should be given the possibility to choose to whether or not receive vaccines, they are all enemies of humanity, enemies of the common good and enemies of their peers. Those who speak of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a disease that causes paralysis and that has been mainly related to the flu vaccine, but also to other vaccines such as typhoid fever, are also “anti-vaccines”.
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Public Health versus Individual Rights
A newborn baby, in most countries of the planet, in his first 12 hours of life receives the Hepatitis B vaccine. He receives this first dose by protocol, law or regulation, and without prior studies or parents being informed about possible adverse effects. Which is the urgency of applying this vaccine to a newborn? Well, if the mother is a carrier of this virus (something that could be known in advance), the vaccine will protect the baby from catching the disease. In addition, other family members may be infected and not know it, thereby infecting the newborn. Now, if this disease is transmitted by blood or other body fluids (it is a blood or sexually transmitted disease), how could the newborn be infected by someone other than its mother? The CDC details: “Open cuts or sores, sharing toothbrushes or other personal items, food chewed for a baby”.
If a mother is a carrier of this virus, at birth her baby will likely receive hepatitis B immunoglobulin as a medicine in addition to the vaccine. But apart from these specific cases in which the mother is a carrier, the risks for a newborn of contracting Hepatitis B seem very few, and the rush to administer this first dose is at least difficult to justify. The baby will receive the second dose a few weeks later, and the third dose between 12 and 18 months of age.
Now what happens if the baby is not strong enough to receive this vaccine, if his newcomer body does not tolerate it and reacts adversely? The testimony of Mariana, a woman from Lincoln, Argentina, shows what happened to her perfectly healthy newborn son. Eight hours after the birth, the boy’s limbs began to darken and he suddenly went from suckling like any newborn baby (it was Mariana´s third child) to not tolerate breast milk. At the time, doctors suspected a possible infection and treated him with antibiotics, but later tests ruled out this hypothesis. Although the baby “got better”, over the months he did not have a normal evolution. The mother went from doctor to doctor looking for an explanation about what had happened to her son, who had been born in perfect health. The answer was given by a doctor when her son was 11 years old and had a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder: he had encephalitis from the vaccine received, and also had not received treatment for it. But the doctor’s conclusion was even stronger: “The health system screwed up your son”.
86% of the world’s children receive “basic” vaccines, according to WHO´s figures. Over the years, more and more vaccines are added to the schedules: in recent times, the HPV vaccine and the meningococcal vaccine, for example. The big picture in which vaccines are backed up exceeds the duality of public healthcare versus individualism, and encompasses economic and political issues.
