‘Bad’ parents and vaccines

The only time my daughter legitimately chided me for being a “bad” mother was when she was entering UP and the health service asked for her childhood immunization record. Apart from the fact that we could no longer retrieve the record from her pediatrician, a subsequent test found out that she had not gotten the final dose of a vaccine for a basic childhood disease. (And just to show you how bad a mother I am, I’ve subsequently forgotten what disease it was.)

When she came home after getting the injection, she scolded me, asking me if I knew that inoculation for a childhood disease in adulthood “means the injection is so much more painful.”

Silently, I accepted her criticism. I was feeling like sh*t myself, for about the biggest sin of neglect a parent can commit is to overlook a child’s basic immunization needs. Fortunately, my daughter has survived living with a bad mother and the fact that she is now into her third decade on earth is proof that she is none the worse for the erratic care.

Fortunately for Filipino children—and millions of other children around the world—there is Unicef to provide a better standard of care. Almost half of the world’s children under five years are now assured of life-saving vaccines, with Unicef procuring 2.5 billion doses of vaccines to children in nearly 100 countries in 2016. As announced during World Immunization Week, the United Nations agency for the welfare of children is today the largest buyer of vaccines for children in the world.

In the Philippines, Unicef procured $33 million worth of vaccines in 2015-2016, with $1.5 million worth of technical assistance and supplies to strengthen immunization in urban poor and conflict areas.

If only parents—unlike myself—did a better job of ensuring that their children are given the life-saving drugs to protect them from basic deadly diseases, along with other measures like providing proper nutrition, imparting good hygienic habits, ensuring their safety, and accessing education.

Access to immunization has led to a dramatic decrease in deaths of children under five from vaccine-preventable diseases, says Unicef. One achievement of this immunization campaign is that the world is now close to eradicating polio, which remains endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For the most part, thanks to concerted antipolio drives in previous decades (led by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative where Unicef is the lead procurement agency), children the world over have benefited from what’s called “herd immunity”—or protection from an infectious disease when there are hardly any other people from whom they can catch the pathogens.

So the need to immunize your child goes beyond the child’s survival, it also ensures that other children are protected from the disease even if they themselves are not immunized.

Unicef’s “devotion” to immunization has proven its worth beyond polio. Between 2000 and 2015, under-five deaths due to measles declined by 85 percent and those due to neonatal (newborn) tetanus by 83 percent. The agency adds that a proportion of the 47-percent reduction in pneumonia deaths and 57-percent reduction in diarrhea deaths is also to be attributed to vaccines.

“Bad” parents—consciously so or not, by intent or constrained by situations beyond their control—are still to be found. Unicef estimates that 19.4 million children the world over still miss out on full vaccinations every year. Around two-thirds of these children at risk live in conflict-affected areas, although weak health systems, poverty and social inequities, and, may I add, parental neglect or even, astonishing as it seems, parental prejudice, also mean that “one in five children under five is still not reached with life-saving vaccines.”

Dr. Robin Nandy, chief of immunization at Unicef, declares that “all children, no matter where they live or what their circumstances are, have the right to survive and thrive, safe from deadly diseases.”

Here’s hoping their parents recognize this right and champion it, for their own children and for all other children.