Why is it so important to vaccinate?

Prof. Eli Somech, director of the children's division at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon and also serves as the chairman of the Israeli Department of Infectious Diseases in Children, says that a parents' decision that relies on intimidation on the Internet and on television harms their children and other children in the environment

By Prof. Eli Somech

Why is it so important to vaccinate? Apparently the answer to this question is clear, giving vaccines is a great success story of the world of medicine, technology and human progress. Thanks to vaccines, horrific and deadly infectious diseases such as smallpox, tetanus, polio and more have almost disappeared from the world.

The administration of vaccines also resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of cases of pertussis, measles, jaundice and meningitis and now an effort is being made to reduce the burden of chicken pox complications, severe diarrhea in babies and even prevent cervical cancer cases. Why then are the voices of those doubting the need to vaccinate heard? The voices are heard well on the internet, in the written media and even got an expression in a television show. I will go ahead and say that I have no doubt that the parents who choose not to vaccinate their children do so out of an inner conviction that they are indeed doing the right thing for their children. In this article I want to convince those parents that their decision not to vaccinate is a serious mistake resulting from misinformation and half-truths and the price of this mistake may be paid by both their children and other children around.

In the same subject: world fixer Joseph Lister and his war on infections

One of the seemingly impressive and "convincing" reasons given in programs that deal with vaccines are severe tragic cases such as brain damage, autism and more, which supposedly developed after vaccination. When examining these cases, several important facts must be kept in mind. Most of the severe hereditary and degenerative diseases are manifested in the first two years of the baby's life and these are the years when the children receive most of the vaccines, so it is very easy to be tempted and blame the vaccines for causing the diseases. And every beginning student of the sciences will be able to say that if certain events took place in close proximity in time, surely one cannot rush to conclude that one of them caused the other.

For example, if after the failure of the football team, God forbid, a natural disaster such as a flood occurs, then even the most pious mystics will find it difficult to believe that the sporting failure caused the natural disaster. If so, the best way to check if the vaccines cause the same terrible effects they are accused of is to check in a scientific and systematic way if effects such as brain damage, autism, crib death, etc., are more common among vaccinated children than unvaccinated ones. In fact, such a scientific test is done all the time and on a huge scale and these tests repeat and unequivocally rule out the causal link between vaccines and these tragic phenomena. For example, it was found that there is no connection between the administration of the measles vaccine and the onset of autism and that the first studies that hinted at such a connection were scandalous and false. It has also been proven that, contrary to the panic that was here two years ago, the administration of the flu vaccine is not associated with deaths, and that the administration of the new cervical cancer vaccine does not cause more morbid symptoms in vaccinated women compared to those observed in unvaccinated women.

In fact, the side effects of the vaccines are relatively mild, such as fever and local irritation that pass after a few days. Severe side effects are extremely rare and the risk of death is nil. All this at the expense of mortality and severe morbidity associated with severe infectious diseases where the death rate can sometimes reach up to one case for every ten infected.

The "vaccinations", so the opponents further claim, "cause an unbearable burden on the immune system of the tender baby". However, anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the structure of the immune system will be able to reject such a claim easily. Because the baby's immune system allows it to deal with over 100 thousand polluting factors.

Moreover, while a simple viral infection occurs, the baby is faced with dozens of foreign proteins at once. So it is ridiculous to claim that there is a problem in dealing with the burden of several dozen foreign proteins given during the entire first year of life as part of the vaccinations. This is similar to the claim that carrying an average basket of groceries from the supermarket is an unbearably heavy burden for a professional weight lifter.

Opponents of vaccines also claim that vaccines include foreign and harmful substances such as mercury and preservatives. The truth is that the mercury salts that were in vaccines as a preservative and prevent spoilage have long been removed from routine vaccines and the only vaccine that still contains mercury salts is the flu vaccine. At the same time, it is important to clarify that if these substances were indeed causing real damage, this would have been revealed in the epidemiological studies comparing people who received vaccines to those who did not. After all, we are talking about a huge number of hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated, so it cannot be assumed that such damage would not have been reflected in the environmental studies that have been done over the years.

You can sometimes hear milder statements such as "I am not against vaccinations in a sweeping way" or "it is better to vaccinate but carefully" or "vaccinate but at a later age" and more. There is no scientific basis behind such statements and they ultimately lead to an increase in the number of unvaccinated babies. The increase in the rate of non-vaccination has a clear and very heavy social price tag, which is an increase in morbidity and mortality of babies in Israel and worldwide. This is because most infectious diseases have not completely disappeared from the world and as soon as the level of immunity drops these diseases will appear and strike again. We can learn from the experience of developed countries such as England, Japan and Sweden where an unjustified panic that arose around measles and whooping cough vaccines led to a noticeable decrease in the rate of those vaccinated, which quickly led to an increase in the rate of measles and whooping cough with a dramatic increase in the number of deaths. In other words, many children have paid with their lives for irresponsible statements and publications and for misleading the parents, and we certainly do not want such a phenomenon to occur here in Israel. While writing these lines, I was told about an unvaccinated baby who is hospitalized in serious condition in the pediatric intensive care unit at Shaare Zedek Hospital due to meningitis. This is particularly unfortunate because the serious disease could have been easily avoided if the baby had been routinely vaccinated with the drop of milk.

It is also worth remembering that giving a vaccine is not just a supplement or a kind of privilege that the parent should consider whether or not to give to their child. This is because withholding vaccination from the child means denying the child's right to benefit from the medical progress made possible by the world of science in order to preserve his health, and the child's right to this is anchored in the laws of our society. In fact, avoiding giving the vaccines is like taking the baby born in the 21st century on a journey in the time machine to the 19th century with all the dangers to his health that are involved. I am sure that no parent wants to do this to their children. Therefore, for the health of your children, for the sake of living in a healthier and safer society, be sure to vaccinate your children.

The writer is the director of the children's division at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon and serves as the chairman of the Israeli Department of Infectious Diseases in Children.