We are constantly being told that it is only the ‘fringe dwellers’ and those who are not very intelligent when it comes to science who would ever dream of questioning the safety or effectiveness of vaccines. And yet, here is a study from that bastion of vaccination-science, Vaccine, which shows that a large number of nurses (98% of them surveyed) – people who are trained to understand how vaccines are meant to work and how safe they are purported to be – are saying no to vaccination.
And they are NOT declining to vaccinate because of anything that an organisation like the AVN is doing. Instead, their lack of trust is due to the untrustworthy way in which vaccinations have been promoted and ‘sold’ to the public and the obvious problems such as the fake Swine Flu pandemic and the huge upsurge in whooping cough despite high levels of vaccination.
Medical science does more to make people turn away from vaccination then 100 vaccine-safety groups could or would ever do. So the harder doctors and government officials try to push and the more they try to suppress information and force complaince, the more they will find that people are saying no – even if saying no means losing their job.
What lies behind the low rates of vaccinations among nurses who treat infants?
Background: In most countries rates of immunizations of health care workers with recommended vaccines are not satisfactory.
Objectives: To identify reasons behind the low rates of compliance of Israeli nurses in Mother and Child Healthcare Centers (MCHC) with an official request for pertussis vaccination.
Methods: Three focus groups were conducted. Qualitative analysis identified themes that could explain the nurses’ non-compliance.
Results: Trust in health authorities was low, mainly following the A/H1N1 purported influenza pandemic. In addition, nurses did not see the importance of being role models for the public and demanded the autonomy to decide whether to receive vaccinations. The nurses differentiated between their role as nurses and their personal life, expressed fear of new vaccines and exhibited low levels of risk perception. Misconceptions regarding vaccinations were expressed by the nurses.
Conclusions: Antivaccinationist ideas were expressed by MCHC nurses and these attitudes may have led to non-compliance with vaccination guidelines.
Thank you to www.preventdisease.com for posting the link to this article. Their critique can be found by clicking here.
Here’s another article on this same subject:-
http://preventdisease.com/news/12/042312_Nurses-Losing-Faith-In-Vaccines-Becoming-Distrustful-of-Health-Authorities.shtml
What angers me about all this is the way that nurses, who refuse to be vaccinated themselves because of concerns about the vaccines, continue to extoll the benefits of vaccinations to a gullible public, particularly parents of young children. In the UK, less than 24% of health professionals were prepared to ‘subject’ themselves to the H1N1 flu vaccine. If there had been a REAL flu pandemic, these same health professionals would have spread the infection. This is an ongoing example of the ‘Don’t do as we do; do as we SAY’ attitude of medical professionals these days.
Those persons in the Nazi death camps who assisted Hitler with his extermination programme, claimed to be ‘only following orders’- an extreme analogy?-or maybe not!!
According to your blog: ‘And yet, here is a study from that bastion of vaccination-science, Vaccine, which shows that a large number of nurses (98% of them surveyed) – people who are trained to understand how vaccines are meant to work and how safe they are purported to be –are saying no to vaccination.’
A large number of nurses? Actually the report itself states: ‘As this is a qualitative study including a small group of nurses in only two areas in Israel we cannot generalize to other HCWs groups.’
There were, in fact, three groups of nurses interviewed for this qualitative study who were a convenience sample. The group sizes were 9, 8 and 8 nurses respectively. A total of 25 nurses, chosen for convenience. I do not dismiss the findings of this study but I do think a bit of perspective is in order.
You are correct Sian – and perhaps I was reading too much into this. But it comes on the back of several other studies I’ve read recently that indicate only 20-24% of nurses AND doctors take annual flu vaccines and their reasons for declining the shots are the same as those in this study – lack of trust in the safety, effectiveness and necessity of these vaccines. I still believe that when health professionals say they don’t trust a medical procedure, they should be listened to. Instead, the idea seems to be to try and figure out how to ‘re-educate’ them to think like everyone else. Very strange.
I agree that if health professionals say they don’t trust a procedure they should be listened to. However, the conclusions I draw from this are probably quite different to yours. I can assure you from my own experiences while studying at university, and in the workforce, that not all health professionals have the capacity to understand the scientific principles which support vaccination policy. Many people with scientific qualifications lack the ability to critically analyse research. This is disappointing in a country where the government uses numbers of people achieving tertiary qualifications as an outcome measure for its society.
I understand that people, including some health professionals, may feel a bit sceptical after all the publicity associated with the H1N1 influenza pandemic, but it is important to remember that it is always easy to judge decisions and the management of such situations with the benefit of the retrospectscope. Circumstances could have been very different. As it was, intensive care units were working at beyond capacity, elective surgeries were cancelled due to lack of beds, and pregnant women and the young formed a disproportionate percentage of those who were hit badly by this virus. These tragic stories do not tend to make the front page of newspapers, and families generally desire privacy to grieve at these times, so the general public is usually unaware.
It is a shame that educated health professionals would not understand that, although the flu vaccination only protects against the three main strains of likely-to-be-circulating influenza, this protection not only reduces their risk of contracting the most prevalent influenzas (as well as some protection against related strains), but also reduces their risk of passing it onto clients who may be vulnerable due to age and/or illness. I describe the benefit to my patients as being given a 60m head start in a 100m sprint.
I regularly read anecdotes (which are not my favourite form of evidence) on the AVN page of people’s relatives who have the flu shot and are still reportedly sick every year while those who don’t have it maintain robust health. In my work I encounter hundreds of elderly people every year, in their 80s and 90s, who have annual flushots dating back 20 years. The vast majority of these people have never had a problem with ill-health. Not that this really proves anything useful.
Could you please also quote these other studies?
Many thanks, Angus.
Angus, have you done a search of google scholar? If not, please do so and you will find plenty of studies. Use terms like nurses don’t get flu vaccine. Then doctors don’t get flu vaccine. If this doesn’t work for you, let me know.
I don’t think searching for ‘nurses/doctors don’t get flu vaccine’ is going to generate an unbiased search result.
Perhaps not Dane, but i do think you are intelligent enough to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as that goes.
I work in a multidisciplinary health organsiation that includes Exercsie Physiologists, RNs (including a team of midwives), GPs, Dieticians, and Health Scientists. Our organisation provides us with free flu shots each year and the vast majority of the workers (myself included) get our shots – and this is despite my training in Microbiology and my general dislike of big pharma ethics. So not all nurses (or health professionals) are against flu shots. I am not sure that such a study can be used to make generalisations in Australia.
I don’t think anyone ever said that ALL nurses and health professionals are against flu shots, but survey after survey both in Australia and overseas have indicated an uptake rate amongst health professionals of between 25 and 33%.
To be fair, your critique of the article quite specifically says “And yet, here is a study from that bastion of vaccination-science, Vaccine, which shows that a large number of nurses (98% of them surveyed) – people who are trained to understand how vaccines are meant to work and how safe they are purported to be – are saying no to vaccination.” That appears to the average person to be reporting that a large number of nurses are saying no to vaccines. It also fails to identify that the study was not in Australia. I am a nurse and I can guarantee you that although there are nurses who choose not to vaccinate, the vast majority that I work with do vaccinate and do support vaccination. Please provide links to the survey after survey that you quote, I would be interested to read those surveys and the environment in which they were undertaken.
Louisa – first of all, I never claimed that this study was in Australia and it quite clearly states where the study was done in the first paragraph of the abstract. I believe that people are intelligent enough to read this and make up their own minds.
Secondly, there have been several recent surveys of Australian healthcare workers which have shown similar results.
Here’s one that shows a 20% acceptance rate in some hospitals:
Mandatory flu vax proposed for healthcare workers
A A A
Print Article |
14th Feb 2012
Byron Kaye all articles by this author
GPs already rank among Australia’s best healthcare workers when it comes to getting their flu vaccinations – but for some their voluntary annual jabs could become mandatory under a proposal for stricter immunisation rules.
The Australian-based Influenza Specialist Group (ISG) said last week that with flu season approaching it was time for the government to play a bigger role in ensuring all health workers – particularly those who work close to patients – get their jabs.
This would include introducing mandatory vaccinations for staff working in direct hospital care, in emergency departments, or working with cancer patients.
ISG also proposed rules that would force hospital staff who refuse vaccinations to sign statutory declarations explaining why, and to be moved to non-clinical areas.
“Hospital based healthcare workers, at the moment their uptake is much lower than community based healthcare workers,” University of NSW senior research fellow and ISG member Dr Holly Seale (PhD) told MO.
“Many of them don’t recognise the need… [or] don’t feel that they are at risk; they also hold a lot of misconceptions about the vaccine – they feel that they may get sick from it.”
Hospital staff had vaccination rates as low as 20% in some states, while GPs had rates around 70%, Dr Searle said.
RACGP vaccination spokesman Dr Ronald McCoy questioned the effect of compulsory vaccinations or greater financial incentives, recalling the government offered free swine flu jabs and still many people had not taken them.
“We don’t have compulsory vaccination for anything else in this country, so I don’t think it’s likely to happen,” he said.
“I do think we should [instead] spend a lot more time educating healthcare workers about basic health control measures.”
http://www.medicalobserver.com.au/news/mandatory-flu-vax-proposed-for-healthcare-workers
And this one which showed rates of acceptance among doctors and other health care workers (in Australia) as low as 16%:
Seasonal influenza vaccination in Australian hospital health care workers: a review
Holly Seale and C Raina MacIntyre
Med J Aust 2011; 195 (6): 336-338.
doi:
10.5694/mja11.10067
Data synthesis: The 10 studies were conducted between 1997 and 2008 and reported vaccination rates of hospital HCWs of 16.3%–58.7%. Two of three studies documenting uptake rates of > 50% were associated with active implementation of vaccination policies or interventions. Uptake rates by occupational group ranged from 29% to 58.3% for physicians, 19% to 56.4% for nurses, 23% to 57.7% for allied health professionals, and 18% to 66.7% for ancillary or support staff. Coverage rates in hospitals that provided the vaccine free of charge to staff (with or without an informational campaign) were no higher than in other hospitals.
I just had a very interesting experience at our local so-called “family medical practice”, where I took my son on suspicion of chicken pox. In short, my position is that, since the jury is still out about the adverse effects, and the percentage of apparant vaccine damage too high for my comfort, and the main beneficiaries seem to be large pharmaceutial companies, why not find an effective but kinder, less adverse way to boost the immunity of small, vulnerable bodies? There are anumber of homeopaths in my area with good credentials, including medically-trained GPs, so I’ve gone down that route and paid close attention to things like diet and overall health, rather than the “do nothing or vaccinate” polarized approach.
The nurse, who I saw first, quizzed me a little about vaccination. I told her my son is on the homeopathic immunization program, and that I don’t mind him having chicken pox as I believe actually getting it to be the most effective way to develop long term immunity. He’s an exceptionally healthy kid with a robust immune system, who eats all his vegies! However, since starting school, he has been exposed to other non-vaccinated kids. Chicken pox outbreaks were pretty standard for my generation, and I know many vaccinated kids and adults who have expressed the full-blown disease or terrible cases of shingles as adults, so I’m not persuaded that vaccination is useful. Anyway, the nurse simply nodded- I think she got it but was obliged to ask the questions.
When I went in to see the doctor, he was not only of a different opinion, but actively disparaging of mine.
The conversation went something like this:
Doc: So is he vaccinated for chicken pox?
Me: No
Doc: is he vaccinated for anything?
Me: He’s homeopathically immunized
Doc: Homeopathy doesn’t work, I urge you to seriously consider vaccination.
Me: I’ve given it a great deal of thought already and that’s not something I’m willing to do.
Doc: Getting the disease can be worse than having the vaccination, it’s proven scientifically that the risk of vaccination are minimal.
Me: Are you referring to vaccine damage?
Doc: yes
Me: well it’s a risk I’m unwilling to take. I live alongside a severely vaccine-damaged person (a woman in her 30s who was a healthy child but developed profound mental and physical disability after MMR as an infant). For my generation, we all just got chicken pox and we were sick for a week and then either quarantined or thrown in a room together to get it over an done with, and then we were immune from recurrence.
Doc: You’re wrong, the medical evidence suggests vaccination is the better option. There’s no evidence that homeopathic immunization works, it’s rubbish. Chicken pox is relatively harmless, but it’s the other risks like tetanus that are the problem.
Me; he;s homepathically immunized for tetanus
Me: I don’t think I’m wrong so much as I have a different point of view. Are you familiar with the research of Isaac Golden which found otherwise?
Doc: I wouldn’t waste my time reading it
Me: so are you saying you’re not actually fully informed on the subject?
Doc: I have a medical degree!
Me: (after rolling my eyes)Right. Did you know that there are entire organizations of medical doctors against routine vaccination?
Doc: They’re wrong
Me: (turning to my son)Just as well it’;s school holiday time and rainy, we’ll have to stay home for a few days
Doc: Take him home and make sure you look after him
Me: Ah, that’s my job actually. Thanks you, goodbye…
It was his arrogance and disrespect for an informed position and choice, his tendency to repeatedly say “you’re wrong”, and his unwillingness to read any of the ‘opposing’ literature that most rankled. When he pulled the “I have a medical degree!” number I nearly retorted ” and I have a degree in medical sociology” (and therefore an awareness that beliefs about health are so often the product of indoctrination or immersion in a particular culture-as anthropologist Emile Durkheim said “the God of the clan is the clan itself!), but instead just said I was widely read and informed on the subject, thank you very much! I don’t actually need to pontificate about my degree to arrive at my position as a concerned Mum!
It’s funny how the Australian government has enough repsect for parents and conscientious objection to pay us the vaccination allowance in the same way that vaccinating parents get paid to vasccinate (which we are then able spend on such things a preventative health and homepothaic consultations etc, if those are more in line with our belief systems), yet GPs are not required to show the same degree of respect towards their fee-paying patients! I was effectively being billed (it was a non-bulk billing practice) for being wronged and made out to be a negligent parent, as I’d self-diagnised the chicken pox and was simply there for confirmation and a medical certificate!
Reference material: Golden, Isaac, PhD, “Vaccination & Homepathic Prophylaxis: a review of the Risks and Alternatives” 6th edition,2005 ISBN 978-0-9578726-4-6
I’ve since rung around and learned that, of the 10 kids in my son’s pre-primary group (there may be others as it’s a combined kindy/pre-primary class of 24 kids), at least 8 have full blown chicken pox, INCLUDING 4 VACCINATED (and therefore supposedly immune) children. Not a particularly good advertisement for chicken pox vaccine if you ask me.
And since the chicken pox vaccine is a live virus shot, it is more than possible that the entire outbreak was started by one of those vaccinated kids.
There are police who don’t trust their justice system; there are teachers who don’t trust their education system; there are priests who don’t trust their religion.You can always find experts who don’t trust their profession, and they always have an explanation. So what’s your point?