Article title: Anti-vaccination advocates double down as measles kills 50 Samoan children

Outlet and publication year: newsGP | December 2, 2019

Author(s): Doug Hendrie

New Zealand vaccinologist Dr Helen Petousis-Harris told newsGP that, judging by social media activity, Samoa has a ‘thriving anti-vaccine community’.

She said international anti-vaccination advocates have become more active after the 2018 deaths of the two infants due to a nurse error while administering the MMR vaccine.

‘Certainly, the international anti-vaccine community have moved in since last year,’ she said.

This individual describes a chain of events where the government’s suspension of the vaccination program and investigation into the infant deaths preceded anti-vaccination posts on social media taking advantage of the situation. This runs counter to the claim by the Samoan Ministry of Health that “fear towards vaccinations on the social media, and other media forms causing the government to suspend its measles vaccination programme.”

For more information and context

BK: Did RFK Jr cause a measles outbreak in Samoa?

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Samoan, Australian and American anti-vaccination advocates are continuing to spread misinformation, even as measles rages unchecked among a population with one of the world’s lowest rates of protection.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has directly linked anti-vaccination messaging to the spread of the highly contagious virus.

Director of the WHO immunisation department Kate O’Brien told The Guardian that misinformation on vaccine safety has ‘had a very remarkable impact on the immunisation program’ in Samoa.

‘This is now being measured in the lives of children who have died in the course of this outbreak,’ she said.

The low vaccination rate of 31% is for 2018. According to the article, the director of the WHO’s immunization department blames the poor vaccine coverage on parents’ mistrust in the vaccine and misinformation from an anti-vaccine group. This view is supported by an article published a week later by UNICEF asserting that the poor vaccine coverage was “largely due to misinformation and mistrust among parents.” The UNICEF article is addressed here.

O’Brien does not explain that any dent, however large, in parent’s trust in the vaccine after the two infant deaths could not have negatively impacted vaccine rates in 2018 whatsoever since the measles vaccine program was halted immediately after the deaths and continued through the end of the year. The same is true for the unnamed anti-vaccine group promoting unidentified misinformation about the safety of vaccines on social media. However much fear they stirred up is meaningless as it pertains to lowering the vaccination rates in 2018.

The measles vaccination program didn’t resume until April 2019. There is no official reporting of vaccine uptake from this period up until the declaration of an outbreak in October. Whether parent mistrust and misinformation resulted in poor vaccination rates during this time appears purely speculative. Yet the WHO’s immunization director says that the magnitude of fear the anti-vaccine group is measured in the number of measles-associated deaths during the outbreak. If the outbreak is blamed on poor vaccine coverage, why is the decision to suspend the vaccine program for nine months, only to resume about six months before the outbreak, not to blame, and not even mentioned as a contributing factor for that matter?