Ministry of Health warns 'anti-vaccine' trend could threaten children's lives

The Ministry of Health said on July 11 that the world considers vaccines one of the most important achievements of the 20th century, because they have saved millions of children from dangerous infectious diseases.

Anti-vaccine is very dangerous

According to the Department of Preventive Medicine (Ministry of Health), vaccines have proven their value in protecting children from many dangerous infectious diseases. However, like medicine, no vaccine, no matter how good, can guarantee absolute safety as desired, because vaccination means introducing a foreign antigen into the body.

Vaccination is an active disease prevention measure for children. Illustration: H. Hai

Normally, each individual reacts to the vaccine at different levels and most only have mild reactions such as fever, pain and swelling at the injection site and recover within 24 hours. However, a very small number of bodies have strong reactions to the vaccine such as high fever, convulsions, prolonged crying, cyanosis, even anaphylactic shock and death.

Therefore, in reality, in many cases, when injected with the same batch of vaccine, or even the same vial of vaccine, some children have very serious reactions, while all other children are completely normal, and this is due to each person's individual reaction to the vaccine, not due to the quality of the vaccine.

However, today's popular social networks are a favorable environment for creating false rumors, offensive trends, and distortions that cause confusion in public opinion, causing serious damage to individuals, organizations, or community security.

The anti-vaccine trend also needs to be warned, because it can threaten the lives of families and the entire community.

How vaccines save children?

The Ministry of Health affirms that thanks to the use of preventive vaccines, many infectious diseases have been eradicated, eliminated or significantly reduced in the number of cases and deaths. The achievements of vaccines are recognized not only in Vietnam but also around the world.

As with smallpox, before the use of vaccines, smallpox killed about 2 million people each year, but after a global vaccination campaign the disease was eradicated in 1979.

Thanks to vaccines, two-thirds of developing countries have eliminated neonatal tetanus; the number of polio cases has decreased from over 300,000 cases/year in the 1980s to just 2,000 cases in 2000; the number of deaths from measles has decreased from 6 million cases/year to less than 1 million cases/year; the number of whooping cough cases has decreased from 3 million cases/year to just under 250,000 cases.

Not only do vaccines save children's lives, they also save hundreds of millions of dollars each year in direct health care costs.

Despite its many successes, vaccination is also controversial and there have been periods of declining vaccination rates around the world.

In the UK, for example, vaccination rates dropped sharply in the 1970s due to public concerns about adverse reactions to the Whooping Cough vaccine. When vaccination rates dropped to 30%, whooping cough cases soared from 2,000-8,000 per year to 100,000, with many deaths and hospitalisations. After two major outbreaks and public awareness campaigns about the risks and benefits of vaccination, public confidence in vaccination rose to 95% by the middle of the decade.

In Vietnam, thanks to vaccination, Polio was eliminated in 2000, and the goal of eliminating Neonatal Tetanus was achieved in 2005. The rate of vaccination-related diseases per 100,000 people compared in 2010 with 1984 showed that: Diphtheria decreased 585 times, Whooping cough decreased 937 times, Neonatal Tetanus decreased 59 times, and Measles decreased 573 times.

However, epidemics are always latent, such as the risk of Polio virus entering from countries where Polio is endemic; neonatal tetanus is the disease with the highest mortality rate among the diseases for which vaccines are deployed in the EPI and neonatal tetanus is still the disease with the highest mortality/incidence rate (53-82%). Therefore, vaccination is extremely important in maintaining the achievements that Vietnam has achieved, not allowing the risk of an epidemic outbreak in a small community to become a public health event in Vietnam.

If the vaccination rate is not maintained, the epidemic will certainly break out and the whole community will suffer the consequences. Therefore, the Law on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases has stipulated that expanded vaccination and epidemic vaccination are compulsory vaccinations. Therefore, parents should be wise and take their children to get fully vaccinated on schedule to protect each individual and the community.

According to Dantri