Public health gains through vaccines need restatement

A well-known personality’s post on social media, questioning the use of vaccines and urging parents to avoid vaccinating children to reduce risks of autism, has stirred up controversy.

- Anand Krishnan

While medical professionals have criticised the comment, he has stood his ground. It is sufficient to say that current evidence does not support his claim.

However, vaccines are often a target for such controversies. Let us start with some noncontroversial statements on vaccines that, hopefully, everybody will agree to.

Vaccines have been incredibly useful in preventing deaths from infections, especially in children. This has been a major public health gain of the last century. We can’t afford to not have this weapon in our arsenal. Most, if not all, vaccines have adverse effects — both minor/ major, short-term/long-term — and we need to have mechanisms to capture these data. Long-term adverse effects due to specific vaccines are hard to measure and attribute at a population level, which is true for other long-term public interventions as well.

Any policy decision to include a vaccine in a national immunisation schedule — as opposed to a clinician-based recommendation that can be customised to needs of the individual — needs careful considera tion of the benefit-risk ratio.