Trust us about vaccines, nurses urge parents
Trust us about vaccines, nurses say as they try to turn parents away from social media and accuse Health Secretary Matt Hancock of sounding like a bully for criticising anti-vaxxers
- The Royal College of Nursing encouraged parents to put their trust in nurses
- As well as choosing for their own child parents also have a social responsibility
- Vaccines are proven to be safe and save millions of lives, experts said
Parents should trust health workers’ advice about vaccinations instead of believing what they read on social media, Britain’s top nurses have warned.
And they accused the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, of being too harsh about people who choose not to vaccinate their children.
Calling them anti-vaxxers, a Royal College of Nursing spokesperson argued his comments could lead to parents feeling they were being bullied.
When in fact, the nurses’ union said, people should be educated about how safe vaccines are rather than being forced to have them or getting berated for being sceptical about them.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been accused of sounding like a bully for criticising parents who choose not to vaccinate their children – anti-vaxxers – when instead parents should be educated, the Royal College of Nursing said
The comments came in a discussion about whether vaccinations should be made mandatory for schoolchildren.
‘Mandating vaccines is not the answer,’ said Linda Bailey, a member of the Emergency Care Association, part of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).
‘We need to win the argument as educated and informed nurses and use the evidence we have.
‘We’ve got all the evidence, we don’t need to put compulsion in place.
‘We need to be bold about our assertions, we need to practise from a strong evidence base. We need better education to counter fake news and we need better funding.’
Debate has been raging in recent months about myths that vaccinations are unsafe spreading on social media.
Ideas the measles, mumps and rubella jab could lead to autism or that vaccines contain dangerous chemicals or can make people ill are continuing to spread despite being untrue.
CLAIM VACCINES AREN’T SAFE IS ‘ABSOLUTELY WRONG’
The UK’s chief medical officer – the top advisor to the Government – last year criticised people spreading lies about vaccines being unsafe.
Dame Sally Davies, speaking on the 30th anniversary of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) jab, said people spreading the ‘myths’ were ‘absolutely wrong’.
She said in November: ‘Over 30 years, we have vaccinated millions of children. It is a safe vaccination, we know that, and we’ve saved millions of lives across the world.
‘People who spread these myths, when children die they will not be there to pick up the pieces or the blame.’
One myth is based on research done by Andrew Wakefield in the 1990s which claimed MMR led to autism, but his results were later found to be fake, and the work was called ‘fatally flawed’, ‘fraudulent’ and ‘dishonest’ by experts in the field.
Others claim the vaccine doesn’t work – but after the introduction of MMR in 1963, global measles deaths dropped, on average, from 2.6million to around 100,000, according to the WHO.
The vaccine was introduced by the NHS in 1988, a year in which there were 86,001 cases of measles in England – within 10 years, in 1998, this had dropped to just 3,728 reported.
The figure has fluctuated since, believed to be partly due to the Wakefield scare in the mid-90s, but in 2017 there were reports of only 1,693 measles cases in England.
(Note: Figures quoted are cases reported to Public Health England and not lab-confirmed numbers)
In rare circumstances people can have bad reactions to vaccines but otherwise all the jabs used by the NHS are completely safe.
If children aren’t vaccinated their lives are put at risk and they endanger the health of others who aren’t able to be vaccinated because of health reasons, such as cancer patients.
Claire Picton, another member of the Emergency Care Assocation, said she was in favour of vaccination but didn’t agree with the language Mr Hancock used.
She said: ‘I took complete exception to Matt Hancock talking about anti-vaxxers. What sort of message is that sending to people?
‘We are trying to educate people to vaccinate their children, not to make them feel that they are being bullied into something that they for whatever reason think is not right.’
Mr Hancock last month said he wouldn’t rule anything out in the fight against people who spread lies about routine vaccines being dangerous.
He hinted that it is possible the UK could one day require children to be vaccinated before they started school, as is the law in France and most of the US.
Parents railed back against this, suggesting it infringed on human rights and was ‘like Nazi Germany’.
The RCN’s Nykoma Hamilton told her colleagues the World Health Organization predicted vaccines saved at least 10million lives between 2010 and 2015 alone.
She said: ‘Even in the face of substantial and increasing evidence against this link, there is still vaccine hesitancy.
‘How do we debunk these myths? Parents talk to us, trust us, this why we are here. People need to engage fully in this discussion.
‘We know as parents that they’re scared and often quite confused about what is out in the world of social media. So trust in us, ask us about it, trust your nurse.’
Ms Hamilton, a mother of three, said parents had a responsibility to help protect other people’s children as well as their own.
She added: ‘We often hear that it’s a parent’s right to make decisions about their child. Yes, but I counter that with asking about your social responsibility.
‘Vaccines cannot be given to certain groups of people such as those receiving chemotherapy, immunosuppressants – you are putting them at risk as well.
‘If your child had a severe nut allergy the school would ask pupils not to bring any peanuts in. So why are we allowing children to bring preventable, communicable diseases into schools?’
MailOnline approached Mr Hancock’s Department for Health and Social Care for comment.
Source: Read Full Article