Policy vs. Evidence: Part 1, personal

I have been planning a small series of posts for a while looking at vaccine policy vs. evidence for vaccine policy (i.e. when which vaccine are recommended for which population). This had originally been triggered by the flu vaccine recommendation for under 2 year olds and criticism thereof and some anecdotes on the handling of vaccine recommendations in my own life and online. I will kick off this series with a personal admission:

I am a vaccine refuser/alternatively vaccinating parent - our older child's school holds a current vaccination "non consent" form.

That is the short story. The long story is a little more complex. In the UK, children get their booster shots in school. They are paid for by the National Health Service. So last year, we got a letter home, asking us for consent to a dT/IPV (Diphtheria, Tetanus, inactivated Polio vaccine) booster. Well, it was 9 years after the dT pre-school booster, so the dT was a very good idea. The IPV however, we did not quite see as critical. Polio has been eradicated in the Western Hemisphere (this was before the Russian polio import from Tajikistan. Both children had had 4 polios. More importantly, however, I wanted the kids to be boosted for pertussis (routine on the German teen schedule). First of all, we know that pertussis immunity wanes, whether you had the shots (see also here) or coughed for it, then we know that the booster works for teens, adolescent and adult vaccination was likely to be cost effective, and finally, I had pertussis as a 15 year old (from babysitting an unvaccinated toddler) and I was not keen on anyone in the family living through a summer of relentless choughing. Pertussis is not nick-named "100 day cough" for nothing.

This was an interesting experience. The nurses from the school immunisation service could not help me with a dTaP (aP = acellular Pertussis) or dTaP/IPV. They were nice, though. The GP referred us to the health visitor, who only does babies and toddlers. The nurse from the travel vaccine section of our GP practise hung up on me after I had explained our wishes, with very little patience for something extraordinary. So finally, we landed in a private practise, one of those places that used to make money by selling the single M(easles), M(umps) and R(ubella) vaccines (call me hypocrite). While the nurse was clueless, she was exquisitely friendly, she did not hang up on me, so I could explain which vaccine we wanted, then explained to their resident GP that while that particularly vaccine was not licensed for kids over 10 years in the UK, it was in a lot of other countries (German pdf; I know because DH and I got the same vaccine in 2005). And eventually, after a reasonable office fee and a surprisingly cheap booster shot (£5 a pop), the whole family was back on track. Phew. So when the school sent out another consent form this year, we responded back with another non-consent (and an explanation why we did not consent).

In the end, the whole procedure was extremely sobering. Our decision to vaccinate our school children against pertussis was totally backed by evidence, biologically relevant and followed European recommendations, just not the UK's. In our opinion, the current UK policy was lagging behind the available evidence, even studies from the UK. It required a fair amount of perseverance and the luxury of some dispensable money to protect our children what we considered adequately.