Why I choose to fully vaccinate

When talking about vaccination we talk a lot about facts, so before we get started I just want to start with a fact that is very often left out of the discussion:

We all want children to grow up healthy and happy

This is what I personally care about above all else, and it’s something that I’m willing to bet we have in common. We each, perhaps, have different ideas of how to achieve this goal but I'm sure we agree that it is something incredibly worthwhile caring deeply about.

When engaging on the issue of vaccination I’m forever thinking about this saying: "The most dangerous place to be is between a mother and her child".

I couldn't agree more, and that is not where I ever plan to put myself. You have many choices when it comes to your child's health and I fully support that (in fact I think you would be surprised about some of the views I hold on various public health policies). Choice, however, is the main reason that I wanted to engage on this platform about vaccination. Looking through the trending tag for #vaccines there is a lot of information there that is highly misleading and some that is simply out right false. Any choice backed by such information worries me deeply. So I thought I’d start by explaining why, when I have a child of my own, I intend to fully vaccinate according to the recommended vaccine schedule (the UK one, as that's where I live). Image credit: Pixabay

Full disclosure: I am a current PhD candidate at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, there I conduct social science research into the vaccine decision making process as part of a group called The Vaccine Confidence Project. I am (as of writing this post) funded entirely by the Economic and Social Research Council whose values are to support high quality social science across multiple areas of study (i.e. not just vaccines and not just healthcare).

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The science of vaccination and immunisation is a huge and constantly growing field. At current estimates there are an additional 8-10 journal articles published every single day [1]. These articles are often months, if not years, in the planning/execution and are conducted by individual that have themselves been immersed in the existing literature for years, if not decades. As an example, I have been studying my little corner of vaccination for around 4 years and am only now just about to get my first paper on the subject published.

As such, everyone that works within vaccination only ever works within a limited scope of expertise. There simply aren't enough hours in the day for one person to read and understand every aspect of vaccine development up until now and keep up with the constant flow of information.

For ease I have outline a few of the sub areas that someone may focus on when working in vaccination research.

The usual timeline for new vaccine development is around 10-15 years [2]. This spans from the identification of a disease viable for prevention through vaccination, through a range of clinical trials increasing in size, then post-release wide-scale epidemiological monitoring and finally making sure that the vaccine is produced and available for all that want it. Altogether this includes many thousand skilled researchers and many lifetimes worth of work hours, all with the same ultimate aim to: prevent a child (or adult) from getting seriously ill. My experts lies right at the very end of this truly monumental sum of human effort, where a safe and effective vaccine is available however it is refused by an individual that may benefit from it.

I trained as a cognitive psychologist, the expertise that I bring to vaccination is an understanding of how people perceive risk, consume information and make decisions.

Within my discipline we argue a lot (in fact this is common throughout science). We collect data, perform analysis on that data and then present it to others in our field, who then rip it apart and tell us all the ways that we are wrong. This may sounds brutal (also I can attest it feels brutal too) but being wrong, identifying where we went wrong and correcting for the next time is the only way to become better at your work. One painful fact of working in science is that we’re never really 100% ‘right’, we just trying to be ‘less wrong’ than we’ve been in the past.

This however doesn't mean that we don't know anything. After a while a whole field of academics and industry professionals performing a tonne of studies find that all their work seem to point in the same direction. At some point someone within the field will collect together all of the papers on a certain topic and summarise them to try and work out what they mean in aggregate. From this they likely publish either a meta-analysis or a systematic review. Now we have evidence that we can use to inform decisions. In the case of the full field of vaccines that decision is what vaccine to recommend and when.

Scientists are the first to admit that science isn't perfect and doesn't know everything. It is instead a process whereby we are able to harness the power of thousands of brains and combine them to form more than the sum of their parts.

This is why I will choose to fully vaccinate, there is a system that exists beyond the healthcare specialist that recommends a vaccine. A system that dates back further than my birth, further than my grandparents birth even. A system that is likely the single most complicated thing that we do as a species. It has taken me roughly a decade to become a mildly competent psychologist and another 4 years to apply that to my current topic. If everyone within the system goes through the level of rigour that I go through when producing a piece of the puzzle then I am incredibly happy to trust in their decision.
Image credit: Pixabay

For some of you this trust is going to sound naive, for me however this works as a shortcut. Life is too short to become an expert in everything. I would rather take 350 years of a self correcting system that is responsible for entire modern way of life than someone that claims they have knowledge that has escaped thousands of highly trained experts. It’s a risk judgement, and for me the decision is easy.

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References:

[1] Portsmouth, D. (2012). Identifying appropriate journals in which to publish original research on vaccines against human infectious diseases. Medical Writing, 21(1), 26-35.
[2] www.historyofvaccines.org: vaccine development testing and regulation