Covid vaccine skepticism fueling wider anti-vax sentiment, doctors
Protestors demonstrate against Covid vaccine mandates outside the New York State Capitol in Albany, New York, on January 5, 2022.
Mike Segar | Reuters
Skepticism toward Covid-19 vaccines could be fueling a “worrisome” rise in broader anti-vax sentiment, doctors have said.
Professor Liam Smeeth, a physician and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told CNBC he was concerned that vaccine hesitancy around Covid was “creeping into” sentiment toward other vaccines.
“I’m concerned it’s making people think: ‘oh, well, maybe the measles vaccine isn’t great either, and maybe these other vaccines aren’t great,'” Smeeth said in a phone call. “And we don’t have to see much of a drop in measles vaccine coverage in the U.K. to get measles outbreaks.”
He noted that there had been outbreaks of the disease when vaccination rates dropped in Britain in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In the late 1990s, claims that vaccines caused autism “turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine,” according to the Lancet medical journal. In 2010, the journal retracted a 12-year-old article linking vaccines to autism, and studies have proven vaccines do not cause Autism Spectrum Disorder.
‘Jar full of wasps’
London-based Smeeth said measles vaccination rates only needed to drop a little below 90% for the disease to become a problem.
Measles is a highly contagious, serious viral illness that can lead to complications such as pneumonia and inflammation of the brain. Before widespread use of the measles vaccine, major epidemics broke out approximately every two to three years and the disease caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year, according to the WHO.
In the U.K. last year, 90.3% of two-year-olds were vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella. A year earlier, 90.6% of children of the same age had been given the vaccine.
In the U.S., 90% of children were vaccinated against measles by the age of two in 2019, according to figures from the World Bank, marking a decrease of 2 percentage points from a year earlier. More recent data for the U.S. is not available.
Between 1988 and 1992, that figure fell from 98% to 83% in the U.S., and stayed below 90% for four years. In the U.K., the measles vaccination rate for two-year-olds dipped below 90% in the late 1990s and did not recover until 2011.
“Measles is like a jam jar full of wasps that is raging to get out,” Smeeth warned. “The minute vaccine coverage drops, measles will reappear. So that is a worry, that that [Covid anti-vax sentiment] and that dent in confidence is seeping across into other vaccines. That is a real worry.”
‘Devastating’ changes
Gretchen LaSalle, a physician and clinical assistant professor at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, told CNBC that the politicization of Covid and its vaccines, as well as a lack of understanding of vaccine ingredients and public health, had had “devastating” effects.
In 2020, LaSalle…
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