Sir, - Recently you have published several letters from people attempting to influence parents against paediatric vaccination. While everybody is entitled to their opinion, I believe that in your responsibility as an editor, you should not be publishing letters on this emotive topic if they are only offering anecdotal evidence about side-effects or efficacy.
This is because real data on vaccines are obtained over many years of clinical trials and testing in order to assess the benefit-torisk ratio on each vaccine. On this documented basis, there is not one vaccine on the market for which the very small possibility of minor side-effects far outweigh the probable benefit of prevention against often fatal disease. This is supported by WHO reports going back over 35 years. Even the old imperfect whooping cough vaccine which has had so much bad publicity falls into this category - and it has now been replaced by an even safer vaccine.
Your readers should also be reminded that withdrawal of that pertussis vaccine in Sweden and Russia led to serious epidemics of whooping cough in those countries in the past ten years.
While parents rightly need to be assured about the safety of the products that are being injected into their children, they should also make sure that they have the facts before them about each of the diseases most of these vaccines so successfully prevent and may indeed help to eventually eradicate (e.g. polio). As somebody who works in vaccine research, I know that I would have endangered my own children's present and future health by not vaccinating them. Indeed I find it distressing that anybody could even consider not doing so. Such reasons are totally unrelated to the medical facts on vaccination outlined in the recent excellent letters from Prof Dennis Gill. - Yours, etc.,
From David Brayden
Blackrock, Co Dublin.