In November of 1999 a meningitis C vaccination campaign commenced in order to immunise as many as possible of the country’s 15 million individuals under the age of 18 years. Thirteen million children were immunised in the first year, and approximately 18 million doses of vaccine were distributed in the whole campaign.
The UK’s Meningitis C vaccination campaign led to a large amount of adverse reaction reports being submitted to the MHRA, I was personally involved on a local basis assessing the need for follow-up information to reported reactions. This was due to a decision to specifically solicit reports of adverse reactions from health visitors and nurses. The MCA’s (as the MHRA was known then) Sub-Committee on Pharmacovigilance discussed the results of the monitoring [PDF], and a later Current Problems in Pharmacovigilance noted that the majority of reactions were non-serious and short lived, and suggested the risk-benefit was overwhelming favourable. It was noted that there was a rare chance that convulsions might occur, although some of these may have been co-incidental, faints or febrile convulsions, and this was added to product literature.
However, the arrival of these reports did create some media difficulties. Here is The Sun newspaper from those times.
The Sun headline is misleading. Those 5000 cases were suspected reactions, not proven reactions. Many may have been co-incidental. The term “sick” also includes very minor short-lived reactions.
Last year nobody died from meningitis C. There are around 500 people alive now, who would not have been if the vaccine had not been extensively administered.
Something to think about isn’t it?
UPDATE: A reminder. The spokeperson for JABS (the UK’s leading anti-vaccination website which the BBC continues to link to in the interests of balance), Jackie Fletcher, weighed in with her views on the meningitis C campaign in the Birmingham Evening Mail of September 15, 2000:
Jackie Fletcher, of the vaccination support group Justice Awareness Basic Support, said hundreds of parents had contacted the group with horror stories about the vaccine.
‘We are worried that this vaccine has been introduced too quickly and on too large a scale,’ she says.
‘They are immunising babies at the same time as giving vaccinations for things like whooping cough, tetanus and polio. Their immune systems are not properly developed but they are being forced to cope with six diseases at once.’
Far from being a “a self-help group neither recommends nor advises against vaccinations”, JABS are an organisation with a deep antipathy to vaccines founded in scientific ignorance. This may be more obvious now, but the above comment shows that the propensity to this view has always existed.