Rant Measles cases at highest for 20 years in Europe, as anti-vaccine movement grows

[Bosa]

A climate of doubt about vaccine safety is putting lives at risk, experts warn

A growing anti-vaccine movement in Europe, fuelled by social media and anti-establishment populists, is putting lives at risk and may be to blame for measles outbreaks surging to a 20-year high, health experts are warning.

A fresh Guardian analysis of WHO data shows that measles cases in Europe will top 60,000 this year - more than double that of 2017 and the highest this century. There have been 72 deaths, twice as many as in 2017.

Health experts warn that vaccine sceptics are driving down immunisation rates for measles, HPV against cervical cancer, flu and other diseases - and that their opinions are increasingly being amplified by social media and by rightwing populists equally sceptical of medical authorities.

The European Union’s health commissioner, Vytenis Andriukaitis, accused rightwing populist politicians of irresponsibility, peddling “fake news” about vaccine safety and stoking the climate of doubt.

Andriukaitis, a former heart surgeon, said he was very worried, adding: “Not just me – all of scientific society is concerned – epidemiologists, paediatricians, infectious disease experts and a lot of health ministers.

“It is unimaginable that we have deaths because of measles – children dying because of measles. We promised that by 2020 Europe would be measles free.”

Seth Berkley, the head of the global vaccine alliance Gavi, said scepticism was as infectious as a disease. He said: “It is very hard to inoculate against, given there is no stable authority in the world right now, where institutions and facts are being questioned routinely and lying is OK.”.

“We’re in a very vulnerable place right now,” said Heidi Larson, the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“There’s more hyperbole in the US. But I don’t know a country in the world that doesn’t have some questioning going on,” she said. Different vaccines trigger opposition in different countries, from MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) to the flu vaccine to HPV against the virus that causes most cervical cancers.

The World Health Organization, the EU and the US have all set up groups to investigate the causes of vaccine hesitancy and look for ways to help reassure people. Larsen said: “The reason WHO changed their tune about how important and serious this is was because they had so many member states coming to them and saying: can you help us.”

Populist rightwing politicians, from the US to Italy, Poland and France, have jumped on the anti-vaccine bandwagon, supporting the sceptics and championing the right of parents not to immunise their children in countries where it is mandatory before starting school.

“They are very irresponsible,” said Andriukaitis. “ What can we see in this populist movement? Irresponsibility. Now it is very important to see [what they will do in power]. Let’s see what happens with these measles outbreaks when you have those [in charge] who from the beginning used fake news.”

Recent data has consistently shown a tight correlation between vaccination rates and outbreaks of measles.

A sharp slump in vaccination rates in France in 2010 was followed by a spike in measles cases the following year. In Italy, when immunisation rates fell back in 2014, cases surged from a few dozen a month to hundreds. In Romania, vaccination coverage fell below 90% in 2014. By 2017, it was experiencing more than 1,000 cases a month, up from just one or two.

Populist rightwing politicians and others leading anti-establishment parties have said they were against globalisation and profiteering multi-national corporations, the commissioner noted. They give credence to “fake news” stories on social media claiming drug companies are disseminating viruses into the population in order to sell vaccines. And they support calls to overturn mandatory vaccination where it could win them votes.

Andriukaitis said: “It is very dangerous. My message is very simple now – you elected a lot of anti-vaccine politicians into parliament and now you have them in some governments. Are you ready to follow their decisions based on fake news or decisions based on evidence? There are only two options – fake news or evidence-based.”

In Italy, members of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and its government ally, the far-right League, proclaimed vaccines unsafe before they came to power in a populist coalition government. In 2015, M5S proposed a ban, citing a spurious “link between vaccinations and specific illnesses such as leukaemia, poisoning, inflammation, immunodepression, inheritable genetic mutations, cancer, autism and allergies.”

Once in government, facing what last year was the second biggest measles outbreak in Europe after Romania, M5S appeared to have softened its line, although observers said it was not clear exactly where Italy’s populist coalition stands. Earlier in December, the M5S health minister, Giulia Grillo, sacked the entire board of the country’s most important committee of technical-scientific experts.

In Poland, a small but vocal number of populist politicians support the anti-vaxxers who want an end to mandatory vaccination. The most prominent have been members of Kukiz’15, an ‘anti-systemic’ political party similar to Italy’s M5S. It has backed Justyna Socha, the leader of an anti-vax group called Stop NOP (a Polish acronym for “undesirable post-vaccine reactions”), who has claimed there was a conspiracy among doctors taking money from pharmaceutical companies to hide vaccine side-effects.

Anti-vaxxers in the US celebrated the presidential election of Donald Trump, who has expressed scepticism over vaccines and invited Andrew Wakefield – the discredited gastroenterologist who has claimed the MMR vaccine was linked to autism – to his inaugural ball. Trump was also said to have been considering setting up a committee to investigate vaccines under the vocal anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jnr.

Scepticism has been highest in France, according to research by the Vaccine Confidence Project. Doubts about vaccination have been fuelled by suspicion of the pharmaceutical companies. The populist far-right leader Marine Le Pen has backed those who wanted to overturn mandatory vaccination, saying not enough was known about the long-term consequences of multiple vaccinations, and pointing to the profits made by vaccine firms.

Lisa Menning, who works on global vaccine acceptance at WHO, said some populists and anti-vaxxers “share a mistrust in authorities and even scientific expertise”.

She added: “We have seen how vaccination is increasingly an easily politicised issue, whether around elections, in opposing mandates, even being exploited by religious or other individuals or groups that have an interest in using vaccination for financial or political gain or for building their own prestige or celebrity.”


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It could go both ways, she said. Other populist politicians have pressed for mandatory vaccination as an easy, often reactionary, solution to low immunisation rates.

Larson said global vaccine coverage had stagnated. She said: “It’s going down in some places and we have these pockets [of low immunisation] and this is not going to get easier, especially as more and more vaccines and combinations of vaccines are being brought on board.

“Part of the challenge is that it’s various things and many of them are outside the scope of an immunisation programme – it’s political, it’s religious and it’s increasingly part of identity for people.”

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[Bosa]

Why is Italy the anti-vaccination capital of Europe?


https://www.theweek.co.uk/italy/9504...ital-of-europe

How the anti-vaxxers are winning in Italy


How Italy?s ?digital populists? used the anti-vaccine agenda to propel themselves into power – Political Critique

The “no vax” movement has become a fulcrum for Italy’s populist right.

In Trento, a city in north eastern Italy, a truck pulls a billboard displaying a picture of a child in striped pyjamas, a Star of David, and the slogan: “Let’s not repeat the horrors.” It’s part of a publicity campaign that began last Tuesday. But rather than a warning against anti-Semitism or the rise of the far right, the poster is the work of increasingly hysterical anti-vaccination militants comparing MMR jabs to Nazi eugenics.

Italy’s anti-vaccination movement enjoys widespread public sympathy. When former health minister Beatrice Lorenzin introduced a policy in 2017 obligating children to receive ten compulsory vaccinations, political hostility was quick to follow. Surveys demonstrated that between a quarter and a half of Italians opposed the policy, a scepticism amplified by the populist right.

In the campaign for March 2018’s general election, Matteo Salvini’s hard-right Lega and the eclectic Five Star Movement (M5s) both doggedly opposed the vaccination policy, repeating pseudoscientific objections to MMR jabs. And when these two parties formed a new government in June, new interior minister Salvini called the set of ten vaccinations “useless, in some cases dangerous if not harmful,” without specifying the grounds his views were based upon.

The science of the “no vax” movement is risible. But its effects are no joke. In 2017 Italy witnessed a six-fold rise in measles cases; there were 2,718 measles cases reported last year; an outbreak in the southern city of Bari, and 12 deaths from 2017-18. All those who died were unvaccinated.

Hardline campaigns like Siamo – its full name translates as “We are for Freedom of Care” – which produced the Trento billboard, insist ordinary citizens rather than “experts” should be making medical decisions. Giving credence to such views, M5s and the Lega have argued that children should be allowed to attend school even if their parents choose to leave them unvaccinated.

For virologist Roberto Burioni, “being vaccinated isn’t an act of self-protection, but an expression of one’s responsibility to society.” A stout defender of expertise and the role of evidence-based policy, the immunologist insists that “science can’t be democratic:” when schoolkids risk life-threatening diseases because of the irresponsibility of their parents, the state should insist on doctors’ advice.

Burioni’s books have become bestsellers in Italy’s febrile political climate. Last month he launched a “pact for science”, signed by political figures from former Democratic premier Matteo Renzi to M5s founder Beppe Grillo. One wouldn’t expect a doctor to become a household name for stating views that seem common sense, yet such is the reality in Italy today.

Grillo’s decision to sign Burioni’s pact enraged the M5s’s online fanbase, who branded him a “traitor.” The movement’s devout supporters lambast Burioni as an example of elites’ contempt for ordinary citizens. Their condemnation is encapsulated in the immunologist’s own slogan “science can’t be democratic,” insisting that only “those who have studied these matters” should speak on issues of life and death.

For M5s this is symptomatic of the political centre’s bid to characterise Italians as “functional illiterates,” unable to take informed decisions for themselves. The M5s’s vision of direct democracy prides itself on the idea that “anyone’s say is worth as much as any other’s.” Its anti-elitist rhetoric also exploits the perceived arrogance of figures like former prime minister Matteo Renzi and his media outriders, who routinely deride M5s voters as ill-informed, lazy, and interested only in living off benefits.

M5s leader Luigi di Maio has long indulged anti-vaxxers’ assertion that no one should be telling them what to do. In the run-up to the March 2018 election he argued that only four of the ten vaccinations stipulated by then-health minister Beatrice Lorenzin should be compulsory, admitting that this could be “reviewed if there are epidemics” (even if this would seem to defeat the point of vaccinations).

When Di Maio’s party and Lega entered government in June, new M5s health minister Giulia Grillo undercut her predecessor’s policy by authorising parents to “self-certify” when their children had been vaccinated, rather than providing ratified medical proof.

The M5s policy has since endured several U-turns. In August the government introduced a curiously termed “flexible obligation” for nursery and school children to have the ten vaccinations. The name for the policy was an oxymoron, but it effectively meant that parents would be given more time to comply, and that the policy would be subject to regular reviews. Yet by November, a measles emergency forced the health ministry to roll out imminent plans to vaccinate 800,000 children and elderly Italians.

This was only the beginning of the health minister’s clashes with the scientific community. In December Giulia Grillo sacked the government’s entire health advice panel. Last week it emerged that her office spends €35,000 a year on a “mental coach” who specialises in “neurolinguistics programming.” Such pseudoscience typifies the M5s’s political hothousing.

Yet there are indications that Burioni’s pro-science campaign is working. A survey for La Repubblica found that between 2015 and 2017 the number of Italians who supported the ten compulsory jabs had doubled from 23 per cent to 47 per cent.

For now, the situation in Italy still remains frenzied. The theories that anti-vax campaigners militantly promoted over the last decade had a powerful effect; by 2017 Italy’s vaccination rate had fallen to 91 per cent, far short of the 95 per cent cover that the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control prescribes for a measles-free population. Last Tuesday a panel of 82 scientists in Milan issued an open letter to MPs which called for “rigorous checks” to ensure children were vaccinated.

As they put it, “science can make mistakes, but it is the control mechanisms of the scientific community that provide a powerful instrument for scrutiny.” If science should, indeed, be subject to democratic scrutiny, it is hard to credit claims that parents should be allowed to impose irresponsible choices on their children, let alone others.

Yet in a landscape where expertise has fallen into disrepute and parties insist each citizen should decide for themselves, the anti-vaccination pandemic maintains its grip on Italy’s politics.

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