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USA: Politicization of Covid-19 vaccines fuels the anti-vaccine movement

While the misinformation regarding the covid-19 still flourishing, more and more parents in the US they wonder whether other vaccines are necessary for their children and more and more adults are choosing to avoid them.

As reported by the Athens News Agency, politicization of vaccines against covid-19 came to fuel the anti-vaccination movementhelping to reduce the number of vaccinations against measles, polio and other dangerous diseases.

Parents are “wondering if (vaccines) are really necessary or if we can give them more slowly,” said Jason Turk, a Texas pediatrician and spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Not this is for the majority of parents, but we notice ever increasing numbers“, he added.

Anti-vaccination messages on social media are fueled by conservative politicians and foreign campaigns, with misinformation predating the pandemic.

Furthermore, the decline in vaccination rates raises fears of the re-emergence of diseases that have been eradicated in many areas of the world.

In the US the percentage of children aged 4 to 5 years who have had the recommended vaccinations decreased by one unit, to 94%, in the period 2020-2021.

“I call it a collateral effect,” Turk commented. “It seems to have been caused by the hesitancy towards covid-19 vaccines and the growing mistrust of vaccines and the institutions we rely on to maintain our health,” he added.

In some states of USA the changes were amazing, especially at the height of the pandemic: Researchers observed that in Texas decreased between 2019 and 2020 by 47% the percentage of vaccinations in five-month-old infants and by 58% in 16-month-old infants.

As they wrote in the scientific journal “Vaccine”, this reduction is due to the lockdown, the percentage of children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons and “an aggressive anti-vaccination movement in Texas”.

Washington state saw a 13 percent drop in its 2021 childhood vaccination rate from pre-pandemic levels, and Michigan’s vaccination rate for young children fell last year to 69.9 percent, the lowest level in a decade.

And adults

Rates of adults and teenagers being vaccinated against diseases such as flu, hepatitis, measles and tetanus also fell, according to health consultancy Avalere.

As a result, from January 2020 to July 2021, 37 million doses of vaccines were missed among adults and children over 7 years of age.

“There have always been people who were opposed to vaccines since these appeared, but the last 10 years have evolved and this is largely due to the ability to organize through the media social networking across borders” of the country where they live, assessed David Broniatowski, a professor at George Washington University.

“One of the key changes we’ve seen is that vaccines have gone from being a health issue to a civil liberties issue,” he explained.

The conspiracy theories flourished during it pandemic, according to a 2021 YouGov poll which revealed that 28% of Americans and a significant number of people in other countries believe that the truth is “deliberately concealed”. about the harmful effects of vaccines.

The problem also has international dimensions. His report UN reported last year that 23 million children worldwide they had not had regular vaccinations in 2020.

Source: News Beast

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