A doctor administers the Quinvaxem vaccine at the Truong Dinh Ward Clinic in the capital city’s Hai Ba Trung District. (Photo: VNA)
Hanoi (VNA) –
Medical experts are warning against what they see as an anti-vaccine campaign
that is being waged on social media.
A social media group with some 9,500 members, mostly parents of infants, has
been debating whether or not to get children vaccinated.
Many parents have expressed concerns about cases in which children have
suffered abnormalities and complications after getting vaccinated, with some on
them proving fatal.
On March 25 last year, a five-year-old in the northern province of Ninh Binh’s
Yen Thang commune died after experiencing high fever, convulsions and panic
attacks five days after getting the meningococcal (against
meningitis) vaccine from a local clinic.
On March 6 the same year, a four-month-old in the southern province of Dong Nai’s
Thanh Phu commune also died four hours after getting the Quinvaxem vaccine (a
combination vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B) at a local
clinic.
Several parents have posted their belief that it is better to let children’s
immune system develop normally rather than having through vaccinations,
the Tien Phong (Vanguard) online newspaper reports.
The concerns about vaccine safety have been reinforced by some severe cases of
Japanese encephalitis over the last month.
These cases have seen children having epileptic attacks and even dying after
being vaccinated, the report says.
However, pediatricians say such concerns and views are groundless, and likely
to harm children far more than any real or imagined negative effects of vaccines.
Some 80 percent of children being treated at Children’s Hospital Number 1 in
HCM City have not been vaccinated, noted Doctor Truong Huu Khanh, head of the
hospital’s Department of Infection and Neurology.
“Abandoning vaccines will cause a disaster of diseases,” Khanh said, referring
to the 2014 measles epidemic in Vietnam, believed to be triggered by parents
who did not get their children vaccinated.
“Side effects of vaccines occur in some children because each child has a
different mechanism that reacts differently to vaccines,” he added. “It is
better to minimise the side effects than abandon vaccines.”
Without vaccines, child mortality would increase and those who survive diseases
would have to live with disabilities for the rest of their lives, he warned.
Dr Phan Trong Lan, Director of the Pasteur Institute in HCM City, said that
based on national reports on the effectiveness of vaccines, authorities would
not continue using vaccines that are harmful to citizens, especially children.
Lan said he understood mothers’ concerns on seeing abnormal physical symptoms
appear in vaccinated infants, as well as their eagerness to find the cause of
those symptoms.
“They have doubts, they seek information from everywhere. And before they can
conclude what is right and what is wrong, they stop believing in the importance
of vaccines for young children,” he said.