FLU vaccinations for babies are still a long way off, experts said yesterday — and they may never happen.
In spite of a flurry of headlines at the weekend, there are no plans to add flu to the list of jabs that babies are already given. More and better evidence would be needed before such a step could be seriously considered, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation decided at its November meeting.
The committee had already been told in September that vaccinating babies under 2 would reduce the burden of infection, but that the benefit would be felt mostly by adults.
Children who get flu pass it on to their parents, or their grandparents, who are at much greater risk of dying as a result. Cutting the number of infections in babies would therefore confer some benefits, but not directly on the infants themselves.
The JCVI concluded that much more information was needed. Would the vaccine protect in the first two winters of life, and would it reduce the need for hospital treatment? Equally importantly, studies would need to show real benefits for young children rather than for anyone else before any recommendation for or against could be made.
Advertisement
How did these sensible recommendations become headlines suggesting that babies were about to be subjected to jabs that their immune systems could not bear? To explain that requires an analysis of the pathology of the press, rather than the pathology of influenza.
Since the MMR controversy surfaced, vaccination has become a touchstone issue among the worried middle-classes.
The diseases that used to kill or disable babies — measles, mumps, tetanus, diphtheria, polio — are forgotten. Instead, commentary focuses on the real or perceived risks of vaccination itself.
A central issue is the supposed vulnerability of the infant’s immune system to a series of vaccinations. Nobody quite knows where this idea originated, but it lacks any scientific backing.
Life outside the womb throws thousands of challenges at a child’s immune system, with which it copes easily.
Advertisement
Catching a cold subjects a baby to up to ten antigens, while a sore throat delivers up to fifty — far more than even the most megalomanic vaccine schedule could envisage.
Studies have shown that giving vaccines in combination carries no greater risk than giving them individually. So it is a myth that adding to the vaccine “burden” poses a risk to babies.
In fact, giving several vaccines at once saves stressful visits to the doctor and makes it more likely that infants will be fully protected.
Vaccinations are not without risk; but their risks are tiny compared with the diseases that they protect against. Those of us who remember the great whooping cough fuss in the 1980s (it was supposed to cause brain damage, on the basis of evidence that turned out to be worthless) are immunised against vaccine scares.
That episode caused a huge number of worried mothers to deny their babies vaccination, caused a whooping cough epidemic, and that resulted in an estimated 70 deaths.
Advertisement
That is a heavy burden for journalism to have to bear, but one that each new generation conveniently forgets.