A new law takes force in France on 1 January to up the number of mandatory childhood vaccines to 11 from three. It has provoked a polemic, but the law is sound. If there is a problem here, it is the neglect by officials of the main drivers of vaccine hesitancy.
France isn’t the first nation to get tough, as anti-vaccination views rose widely after the Wakefield scandal in the UK. Most recently, Italy passed a similar law in July, and a number of US states have also . However, France has the world’s worst anti-vax attitudes: a 2016 showed that 41 per cent of people there say vaccines are unsafe.
The hope is the law will reverse a 20-year fall in vaccine coverage that has eroded herd immunity and raised the risk of epidemics. To prevent outbreaks of measles, for example, it is recommended that 95 per cent of the population be inoculated. France, stubbornly below that target, saw 24,000 cases of measles between 2008 and 2016. Of those, 1500 got pneumonia, 34 had neurological complications and 10 died.
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Against this backdrop, the new law makes sense. The additional vaccines – for whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae, pneumococcus and meningococcus C – are currently recommended in France but not obligatory, although the distinction has no clinical or epidemiological grounds.
The edict is also less onerous than the one it replaces in a key way: non-compliance will no longer attract criminal sanctions. Currently, for the three mandated vaccines – diphtheria, tetanus and polio – you risk jail and a hefty fine for refusal. Admittedly, children who haven’t had all 11 vaccines will be barred from public crèches and schools, so most parents will have little choice but to comply. However, it feels less draconian.
Anti-vaxxers rule
Job done then? Not necessarily. The hitch is that the government’s promotion of the law is lacking. It makes its case in mainstream news outlets, but rarely the broader internet and on social media. Although social media use is than the US and UK, 48 per cent of adults do still use it, and anti-vax views rule there.
The government knows it needs to do more to get its message out. Alain Fischer, an immunologist heading the committee advising it on vaccination, has said that many people have forgotten the horrors of epidemics. His committee was due to discuss this month how to counter social media anti-vaxxers.
Let’s hope these efforts don’t prove too late. A by newspaper Le Figaro suggested that the French were evenly split on the law, and some experts have that a browbeating approach may push hesitators into adopting a more extreme position. Tips about how to get a fake inoculation certificate for your child are already online.
There is an early lesson in this for other governments battling hesitancy: embrace all the ways in which people get information today if you want your message to rise above the anti-vax froth.
Read more: Can a new history of vaccination silence doubters?; Booster shots: The accidental advantages of vaccines
