I am really concerned to hear that the Matt Hancock (Health Secretary) is considering forcing parents to immunise their young children by making it compulsory. In my view, this seriously impinges on the civil liberties of both parents and their young children. We have to remember that parents are doing what they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be the best course of action for their children. Forcing young children to ingest a vaccine with a weakened but live bacterium is not the answer. The solution to increase the uptake of the MMR vaccine is to:
- Recognise the genuine & legitimate concerns of parents who are opposed to the triple vaccine. Parents are not necessarily against the Measles vaccine but rather concerned about the Triple MMR vaccine on offer from the NHS.
- Educate the reluctant parents on both the benefits & risks of not immunising their young children. Children with weakened immune system or family history of allergens or neurological conditions need special care and parents of such children will have legitimate concerns.
- Offer parents the single Measles vaccine to voluntarily increase uptake of this vaccine (I have never fully understood why governments and health authorities are refusing to offer the single Measles jab instead of the triple jab to young children on the NHS– could it perhaps be to save money?}.
I have discovered that data on the single jab vaccines is not recorded on the NHS database so this needs to be factored in to the overall rate of immunisations to inform the debate. (Quote from the BMJ study BMJ 2008;336:754.“These (single jabs) are available only at a cost on a private basis and information about their administration is not routinely transferred into the NHS child health information systems. There are no routine data on use of single antigen vaccines in the UK, and estimates derived from local level studies9 10 11 and a national survey of providers12 range from around 2% to 21”)
Dinesh Rai
By email
