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DISEASE

Sceptical Danish parents increase measles risk

With every fifth Danish parent choosing not to vaccinate their children, Denmark will fall short of WHO goals and 'undoubtedly' suffer an epidemic, health officials warn.

Published: 7 February 2015 09:23 CET
Sceptical Danish parents increase measles risk
Recent years have seen more and more Danish parents opt out of childhood vaccinations. Photo: Colourbox
Due to sceptical parents, Denmark will not live up to the World Health Organization’s target of eliminating measles this year, Politiken wrote on Saturday. 
 
Just over eight out of every ten Danish children receive the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine that is recommended by Danish health officials, according to figures from the Danish State Serum Institute (SSI).
 
That figure puts Denmark significantly below fellow Scandinavian countries Sweden and Norway and means that the nation will not be able to meet the WHO’s objective of eliminating measles as a childhood disease in Europe. 
 
To hit the WHO target, 95 percent of children need to be vaccinated. 
 
“We unfortunately will not live up to the WHO’s goals. That will contribute to the continued spread of infectious disease in Denmark,” SSI spokesman Palle Valentiner-Branth told Politiken. 
 
SSI said that growing scepticism about vaccines and their side effects among parents is the direct reason that Denmark will not hit its measles elimination goal.
 
“The MMR vaccine was introduced in 1987 and in the years between 2002 and 2005 we had almost fully eliminated one of the major childhood diseases – measles – from Denmark. But now we have a real problem because so many parents don’t get their children vaccinated,” Valentiner-Branth told Politiken. 
 
A large number of Danish parents doubt the safety and necessity of childhood vaccines, and many claim that the vaccines can lead to serious side effects. These parents have thriving communities on social media, where they share information and concerns about the vaccines. 
 
But Allan Randrup Thomsen, a virology professor at the University of Copenhagen, cautioned strongly against basing vaccination decisions on what can be found online. 
 
“On the net, you can find proof of anything. Also in principle that the world is flat,” he told Politiken. 
 
Speaking to Berlingske, Thomsen called parents’ refusal to vaccinate their children “shocking”.
 
“The development is a ticking time bomb because we have a situation in which a rather large percentage of the population is not vaccinating their children. That means that the Danish population includes more and more individuals who grow up without immunity to measles. When measles get introduced to Denmark at some point, which undeniably will happen, we can have serious epidemics,” he said.
 
To hit the WHO goals, just five or six Danes can be diagnosed with measles. Denmark has hit that goal just eight times since 1994. In 2014, 27 Danes were diagnosed with measles. The number topped at 84 in 2011. 
 
Germany is also unlikely to live up to the WHO goals due largely to a major measles outbreak in Berlin, where 375 people have been infected with measles since the beginning of October. 

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VACCINE

Vaccine scramble: How Spaniards want Covid jabs more than other Europeans

Whilst the EU warns that unused doses due to vaccine scepticism are piling up, Spaniards of all ages want to achieve immunity against Covid-19 as soon as possible, the data shows. 

Published: 12 July 2021 10:38 CEST
Vaccine scramble: How Spaniards want Covid jabs more than other Europeans
People queue to get the vaccine in Barcelona. Photo: Lluis Gené/AFP

In Spain, where the Covid-19 rollout has gone from one of the slowest in the EU to currently one of the fastest, pretty much everyone wants to get vaccinated. 

With priority groups almost fully immunised, Spain is still beating daily records with 600,000 to 700,000 doses administered every day. 

The spike in cases among the country’s young population has led several regions to bring forward jabs for teens and twenty-somethings ahead of people in their thirties.

Despite the apparent lack of concern for the pandemic witnessed  in packed squares and streets over the past weeks, young people who have been able to take advantage of the vaccine offer have headed en masse to the vaccination centres. 

When an Asturian youth called Ana Santos told a local newspaper that “after the elderly, it should be our turn to get vaccinated as it’s not as if people in their forties go out, is it?”, her comments went down like a tonne of bricks among this age group, who demanded it was their turn to reach full immunisation first. 

Vaccine scepticism hasn’t been a problem for Spain as it has been for other countries, with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen launching a warning recently that vaccine supplies are piling up, even though Brussels has reached its target of providing enough doses to fully vaccinate 70 percent of EU adults.

“If we look at the statistics, more and more doses remain unused,” von der Leyen told journalists in Strasbourg.

“This is linked to the fact that there is a greater distribution of vaccines, but in part also due to doubts about vaccination,” adding that it was crucial to reach the most sceptical parts of the population” in the face of the “worrying” presence of the Delta variant.

“Traditionally in Spain, we have had much less resistance or rejection towards vaccines, that’s always been the case,” vaccine expert at the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) Ángel Hernández-Merino told 20minutos. 

“In any vaccination programme, it’s vital to count on the population being willing to accept the vaccination”.

A June 2021 Eurobarometer study found that 49 percent of people in Spain want to get vaccinated “as soon as possible”, the highest rate in the entire EU (32 percent EU average). 

Whereas an average of 9 percent of EU citizens don’t ever want to get vaccinated, the rate in Spain is 4 percent.  Around 63 percent of Spaniards told Eurobarometer that they couldn’t understand why people are hesitant to get vaccinated and 71 percent said Covid vaccines are the only way for the pandemic to end. 

In Belgium, around a third of the population doesn’t want to get vaccinated.

In other countries where in the earlier stages of the Covid vaccination campaign it seemed  that available doses were easily used up it’s now becoming evident that sprinting through the age groups doesn’t guarantee that everyone is being vaccinated. 

Germany, the UK and the US, all seen as examples to Spain of how to quickly immunise a population, have all seen their campaigns slow down due to hesitancy and the summer holidays.

Spain’s Health Ministry doesn’t give data on how many people have rejected the vaccine and why, but stats do show that already more than half of the population (57.5 percent) have at least one dose and 43.3 percent are fully vaccinated. 

The Spanish government has stuck to its objective of vaccinating 70 percent of the country’s 47 million people before the end of August, even though it did fall short of its June target by more than half a million doses. 

Rather than vaccine scepticism, what’s been holding up Spain’s inoculation campaign have been doubts over the administration of second AstraZeneca vaccines and the decision to keep a reserve in case the country experienced delivery setbacks as it has in the past, with 2.9 million doses in storage reported in late June.

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