Vaccinations - general comments

In Germany, there has been a very active, sometimes heated, debate about the necessity and complications of vaccinations for a long time. The official vaccination scheme is laid down by the "STIKO" (Continuous Commission on Immunization), a commission of 16 experts within the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. It is known that individual members of the commission work closely with industrial firms producing vaccinations, and that doctors get paid for each vaccination they carry out. The list of the recommended vaccinations has become longer and longer over the past years. At present, the official vaccination scheme for children up to 17 years, starting at the age of 9 weeks, covers 14 diseases (13 for boys). By the time a child is 15 months old, he would have received 27 individual vaccinations (several of these are combined in a single injection). What a heavy demand on the response from the immune system of a young and tender body!

I appeal to parents and readers not to be polarized into the two camps of "fans for" or "opponents against" vaccinations. It is not a simple question of "Vaccination - yes or no?", rather it should be a neutral and factual discussion on "Vaccinations - why for and why against which vaccination?"

Legally speaking, each vaccination involving an injection is a physical assault and could only be carried out with the consent of the client, in the case of a child, his parents. Many parents take the responsibility to give this consent very seriously, making the decision carefully after a lot of considerations which vaccination the child should have and when. The doctor has the duty to explain to the parents about the vaccination, the disease it is supposed to prevent and the possible side effects and complications of the vaccination, so that the parents are able to make an independent decision (according to the "special instructions for carrying out vaccinations" by the STIKO Commission).

Parents who are reluctant to have their children immunized according to the scheme are often charged for being irresponsible. Criticism against them is mostly based on the following arguments. Well meaning relatives such as grandparents who have lived through times when infectious diseases were often life threatening tend to think that all vaccinations would keep the child away from illness and could only be good for them. Another argument maintains that only if each and every child is vaccinated without any exception could a disease such as measles or hepatitis B be completely exterminated, which is the aim of a vaccination campaign. These arguments are not equally valid for all the 14 different diseases concerned. The tremendous improvement in hygiene and living conditions have contributed as significantly as the availability of vaccinations to the decrease of dangerous infectious diseases. The possible side effects and complications of the vaccinations have to be weighed against the reduced risk of contracting the diseases.

As a paediatrician working with Homoeopathy I am often asked whether there is any "homoeopathic vaccination". The answer is No. If there was any assertion that the application of a homoeopathic remedy has the effect of preventing certain diseases, this has not been proven to my knowledge. Homoeopathy is a treatment method for an existing illness and the observed symptoms are necessary for the prescription of a remedy. Thus it is not a preventive measure in the strictest sense. In the debate concerning vaccinations we should leave out Homoeopathy.

I have written these comments following the last essay on Goethe's ballad "The Erl-King" about a dying child and my thoughts on children's mortality rates in the times of Franz Schubert. Perhaps the child in the poem who was having hallucinations before his death was suffering from measles encephalitis? Those were the times when vaccinations would have been most needed. Times when a seriously ill child had to be taken to the doctor on horseback in the cold night. A colleague from the USA once told me about his memories of childhood in Upstate New York, how during an illness he was taken to the doctor on a sledge in the midst of winter. No mother in Europe nowadays would dare to do that. The paediatrician would be asked to do a house call. In 2001 I was doing voluntary work in the Philippines as a member of the "German Doctors for the Third World". There, where infectious diseases were frequent and life threatening, we were vaccinating children conscientiously. There, small children were also dying from severe diarrhea. Unfortunately, no vaccination was available for that. Quite to the contrary I do not think that the vaccination against Rotavirus (causing diarrhea) now in Europe is at all necessary.

We shall go into the discussions about individual diseases and vaccinations in the next articles.