A study published in the world's foremost peer-reviewed medical journal has found that around 50% of Hong Kong's health workers will refuse to be vaccinated against swine flu for fears over the safety of the shot.
Research conducted by the University of Hong Kong and made public by the British Medical Journal consistently found that less than half of 8,500 doctors and nurses in public hospitals would accept vaccination against H1N1 influenza.
The study also found that the figures did not change significantly with an increase in the WHO pandemic alert level from phase 3 to phase 5.
"The major barriers identified were fear of side effects and doubts about efficacy." The study reveals.
Microbiologists and infectious disease experts involved in the study also suggest that the number of dissenters is likely to be broadly representative of health workers worldwide.
The British Medical Journal, now known simply as BMJ, has presided as the most influential and widely read academic journal in the field of medicine for over 150 years.
In our report yesterday , we highlighted the findings of three more surveys by leading British and Canadian medical publications that revealed one in two doctors have severe reservations over the safety of the forthcoming H1N1 vaccine.
The figures also dovetail with those from a much larger Nursing Times magazine poll , that revealed 30% of all NHS nurses said they would refuse to be immunized, with another 33% saying they were unsure of the vaccine.
It comes as no surprise then to learn that government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are launching huge propaganda efforts to counter the growing revolt against vaccination.
In Britain, officials have highlighted criticism of dissenting doctors by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), while the Department of Health's director of immunisation has declared that frontline health workers have a "duty" to take the vaccine.
The US government is also launching its own crackdown on vaccine dissent.
"Federal authorities plan to initiate a nationwide campaign in the coming weeks to persuade Americans to get the swine flu vaccine and to erase any public skepticism about the flu's danger and the safety of immunizations." reports the San Francisco Chronicle .
The $16 million federal programme comes as a response to concerns both doctors and the general public have voiced over revelations that H1N1 shots will contain mercury and squalene.
It will attempt to allay fears over the links these adjuvants* have to the severe nerve disease Guillain-Barre Syndrome , which killed more people than the actual flu virus the last time a pandemic was declared in 1976.
* An adjuvant is a chemical which increases the body's reaction to a vaccine, and thus stretches the number of doses which a given quantity of vaccine can produce. Read more on adjuvants here .
Many people are also concerned about the fact that the vaccine is being rushed through safety procedures while the government has provided pharmaceutical companies with blanket immunity from lawsuits arriving out of the vaccine causing deaths and injuries.
"The CDC will be monitoring immunizations throughout the season." the article continues, "If there are side effects, CDC officials said, they'll probably be rare and won't show up until hundreds of thousands of people have been vaccinated. If serious side effects appear during clinical trials, the vaccine program will be halted immediately."
The propaganda campaign seemed to be in full swing on Monday, with federal officials announcing that they estimate 60 to 120 million people could be infected in the US this fall and winter, with 1.8 million people being hospitalized and as many as 90,000 dying. |
