Child vaccination rates in England fall across the board, figures show
BMJ 2019; 366 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l5773 (Published 26 September 2019) Cite this as: BMJ 2019;366:l5773
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Vanessa, according to this FOIA response to a gentleman on the “whatdotheyknow website” from the Department for Work and Pensions who administer the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, they acknowledge the point you make re multi vaccines being given together and state that it’s not a requirement of the scheme to pin point the specific problematic vaccine.
“It is not a requirement of the scheme for the Medical Advisor to pinpoint which vaccination they consider to be responsible for the claimed disablement. Indeed, as a number of vaccinations are often given in close proximity to each other, it is not always possible to make such an assessment”.(1)
(1) https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/618/response/1543/attach/html/2/F...
Competing interests: No competing interests
Following my response to Robert A Hendry of the Medical Protection Society three days ago [1] I compiled a complete list of side-effects from Patient Information Leaflets for the four vaccine products administered routinely to an 8 week old infant. Allowing for Rapid Response guidelines the assembled information required two letters to encompass it all, and I am not entirely surprised these have not been published (nor did I begin on contra-indications).
Important questions remain. Is it possible to accept such a dosage as safe? Is it possible to say with any certainty that the benefits outweigh the risks (according to the traditional rubric)? We know by and large that infants survive the barrage but are we in any position to say that this is without cost to their future health and development (even if less likely to catch certain infectious diseases)? At what point if a child did not survive would the system be capable of acknowledging responsibility (I wonder if it has ever even happened)?
To have informed discussion, of course, doctors would have to begin by informing themselves and respecting patients.
[1] John Stone, 'Re: Child vaccination rates in England fall across the board, figures show', 4 October 2019,
https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l5773/rr-12
Competing interests: No competing interests
Further to Wendy E Stephens' very valid response regarding "The Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme", along with John Stone's list of 9 vaccines (some in combination) given at the tender age of 8 weeks (even to those born prematurely), I should also like to point out that a parent is not able to make a claim for vaccine damage compensation until the child is aged 2 or over.
That says something about vaccine safety, in my opinion!
By the time certain adverse reactions may have occurred (some chronic conditions previously proven to be caused by vaccines can take months to become apparent), it would be too late to make a temporal link with the vaccine, plus with combination vaccines and others deemed 'safe' to be administered at the same time, it would be impossible to know which one/s (if not the actual co-administration) might be to blame. How convenient...
Competing interests: No competing interests
According to the British Medical Association:
“In March 2015, a unanimous decision in the United Kingdom Supreme Court (Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board) made it clear that doctors must ensure their patients are aware of the risks of any treatments they offer and of the availability of any reasonable alternatives….
…Doctors must 'take reasonable care to ensure that the patient is aware of any material risks involved in any treatment, and of any reasonable alternative or variant treatments’.
A 'material risk' is one in which 'a reasonable person in the patient’s position would be likely to attach significance to the risk, or the doctor is or should reasonably be aware that the particular patient would be likely to attach significance to it’…
…When assessing risks, doctors cannot rely on percentages. The significance of a risk cannot be reduced to its likelihood.
Important factors will include:
the nature of the risk, the effect which its occurrence would have upon the life of the patient
the importance to the patient of the benefits sought to be achieved by the treatment
the alternatives available and the risks involved in those alternatives…” (1)
Unfortunately, some four years after the ruling stated above, this important legal advice is still not being followed by all doctors and disseminated to parents.
With regard to vaccinations are all doctors aware of the contents, ingredients, contraindications and risks of vaccines posed for the individual child before attempting to advise the individual parent?
Public Health press statements have claimed that: “…[MMR] is perfectly safe and perfectly effective.” “That may mean that some young children will have three MMR jabs…That is not a problem. It is perfectly safe and perfectly effective.” and one of the strongest claims: “There’s no adverse effect to this extra jab [3rd MMR]….” (2) (3)
Parents AND doctors are bombarded with this type of misinformation.
If a parent is offered any information by the doctor it will be the Public Health England pamphlet which is designed to promote the vaccine and allay any fears a parent (or doctor) might have about the product. (4)
However, the vaccine manufacturers’ patient information leaflets (PIL) supplied with the vaccines carry details of contraindications, warnings and risk of serious side effects. (5) (6)
The government is fully aware of the risks as vaccine damage payments have been awarded to the sum of over £74 million and the DWP lists all the childhood vaccinations eligible to be assessed. (7)
But parents are not routinely given the PIL and are never informed of the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme at the time of vaccination.
With regard to vaccine safety data:
Are doctors aware that health professionals only report between 2% and 10% of vaccine adverse reactions? (8)
Currently medical practices may well be conflicted by the financial entitlements paid to doctors for vaccinating children registered with the practice. This type of target based payment system may contribute to the high level of under-reporting of yellow cards. In my opinion, a major conflict of interest.
Do all doctors know that the medicines watchdog, the MHRA, does not follow up on every adverse reaction reported? During meetings with the MHRA which I have attended, officers have stated that they do not routinely contact the reporting health professional, six months to 12 months later, to determine if the child fully recovered from the reaction or has further deteriorated.
Without this information neither Public Health England nor doctors have any accurate safety data on vaccines. A point that has been raised with the government time and time again. (9) (10)
In the haste to speed up and streamline more and more vaccines for children the right to informed consent is being ignored. This is not only dangerous for the child from a health point of view but also for the health professional from a potential litigation point of view.
Parents have a right to make informed consent. Doctors have a duty to facilitate this right.
References:
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice/employment/ethics/consent/legal-update-on-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-22008478?fbclid=IwA...
https://sovereignwales.com/tag/south-wales-evening-post/?fbclid=IwAR1ioR...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploa...
https://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/m/mmr_ii/mmr_ii_pi.pdf
https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/2054/SPC/Priorix
https://www.gov.uk/vaccine-damage-payment/eligibility?fbclid=IwAR0Pz2Yyp...
https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/yellow-card-please-help-to-reverse...
Jabs. Deja vu. Taken from the Daily Telegraph 1st February 1974. Vaccine 'Risk To Children' By the Telegraph's Parliamentary Staff. Jabs perspective.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1615747/pdf/amjph00450-0108...
Competing interests: Mother of MMR vaccine-damaged son
I am concerned about the statement of Robert Hendry [1]. As I understand it there is a legal obligation to explain the risks of medical interventions so it would be worrying if these were not explained as well as the benefit. For instance at 8 weeks an infant is scheduled to receive:
Infanrix hexa (DTaP+Polio+HiB+HebB)
Rotarix (Rotavirus vaccine)
Prevnar 13 (13 strain pneumococcal vaccine)
Bexsero (MenB vaccine)
Each one of these products has an extensive range of complications and side effects listed in the Patient Information Leaflets, some of which are both frequent and unpleasant [2-5]. It would beyond the scope of this letter to list them all, but each one could make an infant very ill, and not necessarily uncommonly. Here is the list for Bexsero [5]:-
Infants and children (up to 10 years of age)
Very common (these may affect more than 1 in 10 people)
- fever (≥38ºC)
- loss of appetite
- tenderness at the injection site (including severe injection site tenderness resulting in crying
when injected limb is moved)
- painful joints
- skin rash (children aged 12 to 23 months) (uncommon after booster)
- sleepiness
- feeling irritable
- unusual crying
- vomiting (uncommon after booster)
- diarrhoea
- headache
Common (these may affect up to 1 in 10 people)
- skin rash (infants and children 2 to 10 years of age)
Uncommon (these may affect up to 1 in 100 people)
- high fever (≥40°C)
- seizures (including febrile seizures)
- dry skin
- paleness (rare after booster)
Rare (these may affect up to 1 in 1,000 people)
- Kawasaki disease which may include symptoms such as fever that lasts for more than five days,
associated with a skin rash on the trunk of the body, and sometimes followed by a peeling of the
skin on the hands and fingers, swollen glands in the neck, red eyes, lips, throat and tongue
- Itchy rash, skin rash
Meningitis B, while an horrific disease, is rare, and these are bad effects - and we are talking about giving 1 in 1000 children Kawasaki disease.
Nor is it fair, or reasonable to ask a parent to consider the benefit of society over the well-being of their tiny infant (I do not even know what legal standing that would have). Nor can we know what the long term effects might be when all these products are combined.
It is evident that these matters should be frankly and systematically discussed both ethically and legally. Finally, I am not sure of the standing of Hendry's "meaningful consent" over the traditional legal concept of "informed consent" [6].
[1] Robert A Hendry, 'Re: Child vaccination rates in England fall across the board, figures show', 4 October 2019, https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l5773/rr-8
[2] Infanrix hexa PIL, https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/files/pil.2586.pdf
[3] Rotarix PIL, https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/files/pil.201.pdf
[4] Prevnar 13 PIL, https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/files/pil.453.pdf
[5] Bexsero PIL, https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/files/pil.5168.pdf
[6] MDU, 'Montgomery and Informed Consent', https://www.themdu.com/guidance-and-advice/guides/montgomery-and-informe...
Competing interests: No competing interests
Dr Fryer’s response to my question is a trifle woolly.
Would Dr Fryer kindly give a clear answer - YES or NO, to the following:
All registered medical practitioners are required by law, to obtain full, free, informed consent to any procedure they carry out. This includes administration of immunological products by oral, or any parenteral routes. They must inform the patient or legal guardian, of any known adverse reactions to the said product. They must also advise the patient or the legal guardian, to report to the medical,practitioner, any expected or unexpected adverse reaction.
I believe a clear answer Yes or No is needed from Dr Fryer.
Competing interests: No competing interests
If parents, as per Montgomery, must be told of possible adverse reactions to vaccines, then they must also be allowed to refuse them. It is otherwise a violation of their human right to informed consent to any medical intervention. If they are compelled to accept one or more vaccines willy nilly, then the Montgomery decision has no meaning.
Competing interests: No competing interests
The most important issue in this situation is to ensure that the parent or parents give meaningful consent. The mode of recording agreement is of less importance than the process that is followed to reach an informed decision. It is vital to record the interaction in the patient’s notes. If, despite the clear benefits to the child and the wider public, parents decline consent to have their child vaccinated, the decision must be respected, as is stated by the GMC in their guidance on ‘Consent: patients and doctors making decisions together’. If a complaint arises, members of Medical Protection can request assistance
Competing interests: No competing interests
Can Caroline Fryar, Head of Advisory Services of the Medical Defence Union [1], also confirm that medical practitioners have a duty to warn of the side effects of the products they administer, however rare, as determined by the Montgomery ruling [2]. Everyone understands that the purpose of a vaccine product is to avoid getting a disease, just as the purpose of a treatment is to ameliorate or cure a condition, but is an unusual extension of language to talk as she does about the "side effects" of not having an intervention.
[1] Caroline Fryar, 'Re: Child vaccination rates and parental authority', 4 October 2019, https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l5773/rr-6
[2] MDU, 'Montgomery and Informed Consent', https://www.themdu.com/guidance-and-advice/guides/montgomery-and-informe...
Competing interests: No competing interests
Re: Child vaccination rates in England fall across the board, figures show
Matt Hancock states that “while parents might think their decisions on jabs are a 'personal choice' and 'nobody else's business', they in fact have a 'moral' duty”.(1)
But what of the Government’s “moral duty” to those who become injured through vaccination?
As far back as 1977 before the introduction of the Vaccine Damage Payment Act (1979) the late Hon Lord Jack Ashley MP reminded the Government of their “moral responsibility” to compensate children who had become injured as a result of vaccination. He also urged them to recognise that the benefit is to the community but the risk is to the individual.
“On the question of compensation, the Government have a clear and over-riding moral responsibility to pay the children who are severely damaged, because they are vaccinated primarily for the benefit of others who are too young to be vaccinated themselves. The main benefit is to the community at large, yet all the risk is to the individual”(2)
Today the emphasis is still on the benefit to the population as a whole and the risk is still visited on the individual, but it appears that the only “moral duty” continuously aired, is the one visited on parents to have their children vaccinated.
The provisions in the Vaccine Damage Payment Act of 1979 only ensure compensation to those who in the opinion of the DWP appointed assessors are over 60% disabled. Those deemed to be less disabled, despite establishing causation with a vaccine, are refused awards.
When it comes to moral duties Matt Hancock might want to consider the old adage of “people in glass houses……………..” and urge the Government, (with the same vigour he pursues parental “moral duty”) to embrace their “moral duty” to compensate all those who suffer vaccine induced disabilities.
(1)https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7597873/Parents-moral-duty-ch...
(2) House Of Commons Deb 07 March 1977 vol 927 The late Hon Lord Jack Ashley MP
Competing interests: No competing interests