More pressure for TT's children

CHILDREN in this country do not have it easy these days. The covid19 pandemic has upended their education. They continue to fall prey to crime and the effects of illegal firearms.

Homes should be a sanctuary, but basic safety standards – which should be regulated by both the public and private sectors – are not being met, endangering them as they play in their yards.

Some continue to experience hunger due to widening economic inequalities and unemployment.

Now comes more distressing news for our children: on Wednesday, Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh disclosed a significant drop in the number of children accessing the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccines.

The herd immunity threshold of 95 per cent has not been met, with no more than 85 per cent of children vaccinated against MMR. Yellow fever vaccinations are also down.

Pediatricians have noted there may be many reasons for the flagging interest in these vaccinations.

With free public health facilities no longer a viable option for people concerned about covid19, many have turned to private practices where such vaccines are not free.

The economic situation has worsened the ability of families to be flexible and the need to attend to covid19 in households may have also diverted attention away from these fundamental shots.

Vaccination has long been a condition of school attendance, but because schools have turned more and more to online classes, there has also been less incentive for parents to get their children jabbed.

We suspect “traditional” vaccination regimes have also become casualties of the heated anti-vaxxer discourse and proliferation of misinformation in relation to covid19 vaccines.

The Government must urgently take action to address each of these underlying causes and aggressively intervene to restore this country’s longstanding reputation for having one of the most successful traditional vaccination programmes in the world.

We suggest that all vaccines at private offices should be subsidised for a start.

Whatever the causes of the current falloff, it is ironic that the population, having thus far failed to achieve covid19 herd immunity of 70 per cent – a failure which most acutely endangers children and those who, for the moment, cannot get vaccinated – has also now opened the door to the breakdown of our defences when it comes to other tried and tested vaccines such as the MMR shots.

With covid19 vaccines, we might be able to say they are relatively newer and that suspicion in them is understandable, though not at all reasonable given extensive trials and the scientific basis for their development.

But this falloff in traditional vaccines suggests a development all the more disturbing: a turn away from science as a whole.

And it is the children who will pay the heaviest price for this.