Parents still say no to MMR
Mainstreet Technologies, a Toronto public research company that conducted the survey used “interactive voice response” (IVR) to gather data from 1,013 respondents, all of whom had children between one and 14 who have not been given the MMR vaccination.
Eighty percent of the respondents said that despite a mild outbreak of the measles that has seen 45 Canadian cases this year (170 in the U.S.) they would not be getting their children vaccinated. (note: as of March 11 the number of cases in Quebec alone had risen to 119).
“We wanted to see specifically why parents with children have made the decision to not vaccinate,” the president of Mainstreet Technologies, Quito Maggi, said in a statement. “We found that the major reason, by far, parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children is health concerns.”
Of those polled, 39 percent were from households with over $100,000 in income, 38 percent hold a University degree and 66% percent completed post-secondary education so Mainstreet determined “Education and income really aren’t a factor when you take a close look at the make-up of anti-vaxxers.”
They found 19 percent were not vaccinating due to “religious reasons.”
Homeopathic nosodes criticized
The Public Health Agency of Canada said of those 45 cases of measles this year the majority have been in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec and that they are not connected. Their website says that “measles is relatively rare in Canada thanks to high immunization rates across the country.”
This comes on the heels of comments by health care professionals that nosodes, a substitute product many homeopaths, naturopaths and even chiropractors claim provides prevention against infectious diseases, is ineffective and should not be allowed on the market.
“There’s no evidence to support their claims at all around providing immunity against infectious diseases,” Dr. Strang, the chief medial officer of Nova Scotia, told CBC News in February. “I think, frankly, having them available on the market is dangerous. It’s distracting and it’s helping people avoid immunization or giving them a reason not to be immunized.”
Disgraced Wakefield MMR study
The MMR vaccine has been the subject of controversy since a study of it was released by Andrew Wakefield from the U.K. in 1998. Mr. Wakefield is now considered a fraud and his study shown to be rife with error and fiction. In 2010, a medical tribunal in the U.K. found him guilty of four counts of dishonesty and 12 of abusing developmentally challenged children; he was banned from practicing medicine in that country.
Neither Wakefield nor others were able to reproduce the results of his study. A journalist who worked the story, Brian Deer, said that Wakefield was guilty of “falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare.”
The British Medical Journal agreed Wakefield deceived the public. “It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN in 2011. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
It cannot be known how many refusing to vaccinate their children in Canada were convinced not to do so in the wake of Wakefield’s disgraced study.
