by Marco Cáceres
…According to a recent presentation by European Ecology MEP (Member of the European Parliament) Michèle Rivasi, vaccine safety, “as a general rule, is being questioned” [in France].3 Rivasi went on to say:
Between 2005 and 2010, the proportion of French people in favour or very in favour of vaccination dropped from 90% to 60% (2013 INPES Peretti-Watel health barometer). The percentage of French people between the ages of 18 and 75 who are anti-vaccination increased from 8.5% in 2005 to 38.2% in 2010. In 2005, 58% of doctors questioned the usefulness of vaccines administered to children while 31% of doctors were expressing doubts about vaccine safety. These figures must surely have increased since then.3
The issue of vaccine safety in France received renewed media coverage in April following a report by the country’s Technical Committee of Pharmacovigilance to the Directorate General of Health regarding the deaths of two newborn babies from intussusception in 2012 and 2014 after receiving the Rotarix and RotaTeq vaccines.4 Intussusception is a “serious disorder in which part of the intestine slides into an adjacent part of the intestine.”5 The oral vaccines, produced by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Merck respectively, have also been reported to have caused 500 adverse events—200 of which have been designated as “serious.”4 …