Latest news with #RainaMacIntyre
NZ Herald
26-05-2025
- Health
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Vaccine Nation by Raina MacIntyre
Vaccine Nation couldn't be more timely. The latest book by internationally acclaimed Australian epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre traces the widespread post-pandemic drop in support for public health measures and vaccination. It was mostly written last year, but by now, as it is arriving in bookshops and anti-vax beliefs and conspiracies have
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Junk science, vaccine refusers and the return of smallpox: what worries one of Australia's top epidemiologists
During the first years of the Covid-19 crisis, the University of New South Wales professor of global biosecurity Raina MacIntyre was a fixture on Australian TVs and news feeds, a voice of authority and warning about the dangers faced by societies grappling with the 'Black Swan event' that was the global pandemic. In a new book, she turns her mind to the threats that are coming around the bend. In your new book, Vaccine Nation, you write that vaccination is arguably the greatest public health achievement in history, yet 200 years of progress is now in peril. Where might we be without vaccines? Raina McIntyre: Unicef estimates that in the absence of a vaccine, the world would have seen 5 million deaths due to smallpox every year in the mid-1990s. I am sure anti-vaccine groups would be raging against the statistic that smallpox vaccines, by achieving eradication, has prevented over 190 million deaths since 1980. Without vaccines, we would see a rise in vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, polio, meningitis and so on, and a rise in infant mortality as a result. Until about 20 years ago, infectious diseases were among the leading causes of death in the world. We may see previously rare infectious diseases climb again to become a top cause of death in the world. Covid and lower respiratory infections are already in the top 10. We are seeing epidemics of measles everywhere today, for example. We need very high vaccination rates against measles to prevent epidemics. In Australia and all over the world, childhood vaccination rates have started to decline after the Covid pandemic, and this in part explains the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases. We have to be very careful to maintain good control of measles in this country. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads What keeps you awake at night, in terms of the possible explosion of disease transmission? I worry about an influenza pandemic or a smallpox-like pandemic. Influenza pandemics have occurred throughout history, and happen when a novel bird flu virus mixes with a human flu virus to create a brand new pandemic strain that can spread easily between humans. Typically, a flu pandemic has a high fatality rate. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic caused deaths in the very young, the very old and also in healthy young people. The unprecedented spread of H5N1 influenza across the world since 2020 has increased the probability of an influenza pandemic arising from this virus mutating to adapt to humans. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980, but keeps me awake because it can be synthesised in a lab, and the methods to do this have been described in open access scientific journals. There may also be countries with clandestine stocks of live virus, which could be used as a biological weapon. Smallpox has a very high fatality rate, with one in three people dying. If it were to re-emerge, the impact would be devastating. We do, however, have vaccines that can protect against smallpox and which are highly effective. These same vaccines were used for the recent mpox epidemic. Mpox is similar to smallpox, less deadly, but still serious. One of the variants, called clade 1, can kill up to 10% of people it infects. This clade has been spreading in a number of countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, and has shown some worrying mutations that may increase contagiousness between humans. This too, keeps me awake. In your book you outline how the anti-vaxxing community isn't the only threat to protecting our herd immunity – what else is happening here? The mass dissemination of misinformation and disinformation has also affected the medical profession, who find it increasingly more challenging to separate fact and fiction because of the range of pseudoscientific material that has flooded the landscape. Predatory journals and publications have been increasing for over a decade. These journals charge the authors high fees for vanity publishing. They use names very similar to reputable journals, but have dodgy standards and practices. Essentially, anyone with a theory can get a scientific paper published in one of these dodgy journals. I have seen doctors circulating junk science about vaccines, thinking it is the real thing. Then there are a small number of prominent medical practitioners with large social media followings who began promoting anti-vaccination messages during the Covid-19 pandemic. The vast and instant reach of social media today also makes this much more challenging. What is the best way to talk to someone who is not an outright anti-vaxxer, but may be vaccine hesitant? Vaccine refusers maybe about 2% of the population, but the hesitant people are a much larger group, maybe 10%. People who are vaccine hesitant and who do not feel they have been listened to adequately by health professionals may be more vulnerable to recruitment by the anti-vaccine lobby. This is why it is important for health professionals to be able to distinguish between outright vaccine refusers and those who are hesitant, and then to spend time discussing vaccination with their hesitant patients. What's the key to restoring public trust in vaccines? Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion It will not be an easy task. This needs to be a combined effort by government and non-government organisations, including consumer and community organisations. Being able to monitor and track disinformation would be helpful to governments to enable early response and health promotion. We have recently received a research grant to develop an AI sentiment and disinformation tracking tool, but such tools are not available or used routinely in health yet. Trust in government is obviously a key part of this. In research that we have done, we showed that Australians are much more trusting of government around public health than, for example, Americans or the British. This is an advantage we should not squander. Are you still wearing masks? Should we still? I do in crowded public spaces or if I am visiting my parents in their nursing home. I don't want to put vulnerable people at risk and I don't want to get repeated infections. I read the research on the chronic disease impacts of Covid and would like to mitigate those risks. It has improved my quality of life substantially, as I get very severe asthma with any respiratory infection. I also wear masks when travelling, in airports and on the plane. Aircraft actually have really good ventilation systems, but the air filtration doesn't kick in until you are airborne. Therefore, the highest risk period of catching an infection is when you're on the tarmac. In one case study, a person with influenza was on board a plane where takeoff was delayed for three hours. This resulted in 70% of the passengers on the plane getting infected. A mask is such a simple mitigation to prevent infection. Do you believe we will face another pandemic and will we be better prepared for it? Yes, it's a matter of when, not if – pandemics have occurred throughout history and there are factors that make the risk greater today. We have seen an unprecedented acceleration of bird flu around the world from 2020 onward. We have seen farm outbreaks become endemic in the United states and with H5N1 fragments detected in dairy products. The probability of a pandemic is much higher today simply because there's so much more bird flu, in so many more places, that makes genetic mutation more likely. We would certainly be better prepared for an influenza pandemic than we were for Covid-19, because influenza is a highly researched virus and we already have effective influenza vaccines. If a new pandemic influenza virus arose, the vaccines simply have to be matched to that exact strain, rather than developed from scratch. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, we also have mRNA technology at our fingertips, which may also contribute to better pandemic response. The one area which will hinder any future pandemic response is the huge backlash to public health measures that has been seen following the Covid-19 pandemic. There will be a lot of work involved in winning the trust of communities. So we can end on a high note: tell us what excites you about your field of work? I am excited by the potential of AI to improve health intelligence and preparedness for pandemics – that is what our Epiwatch system does. Epiwatch is an artificial intelligence system that uses open-source data to generate valid early warnings of serious epidemics or pandemics. We have received philanthropic support from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, which came quite unexpectedly in 2022 when other doors were being closed in my face. We have achieved recognition globally – Epiwatch was showcased across the US Department of Defense in 2024 and it has come to the attention of several other governments around the world. The demand for Epiwatch has resulted in UNSW supporting us to establish a company for it this year. That's a completely new experience for me but it's also very exciting. Vaccine Nation by Raina MacIntyre is out now through NewSouth Books
ABC News
26-04-2025
- Health
- ABC News
Raina MacIntyre's book Vaccine Nation celebrates the public health gains of vaccines. It's also a warning
Professor Raina MacIntyre was waiting quietly in the emergency department of a busy hospital last year when she overheard a conversation she'll never forget. The patient in the cubicle next to hers had been scratched and bitten by his cat but was flatly refusing the tetanus booster his doctor was recommending. Couldn't he just have some antibiotics and be on his way? The doctor told him that wasn't necessary and asked why he didn't want a tetanus shot. "I know 30 people who dropped dead. I don't want it. I'm not having it," he said. "Thirty people I know died after getting COVID vaccines." Instead of correcting him — instead of explaining that there had been 14 deaths from COVID vaccines in Australia, all before 2022, and 13 of them after the AstraZeneca shot which had since been withdrawn — the doctor gave the man the antibiotics he was demanding, likely only reaffirming his beliefs. "Privately, many doctors and health leaders bemoan falling vaccination rates and stay silent while anti-vaxxers claim the stage, free to make whatever outlandish … claims they wish," MacIntyre writes in her new book, Vaccine Nation: Science, reason and the threat to 200 years of progress. "At the same time, many fail to provide the role modelling needed for change, stricken by the same fear as politicians" who avoid speaking about COVID because it is "triggering" for so many people. Photo shows Gloved hands holding COVID-19 vaccine, needle in glass container. Three local councils in South Australia have been passing motions questioning vaccines, but health experts say they are based on misinformation and heighten community risk. That emergency department exchange epitomises the public health challenge the world is now facing, and which MacIntyre, who researches infectious diseases, bioterrorism and vaccines as But Vaccine Nation is also a warning about the acceleration of the anti-vaccination movement during the pandemic and worrying declines in vaccination rates around the world, which MacIntyre links to a broader backlash against science and medicine, including from within the medical profession itself. It is a precarious situation given the looming threat of a bird flu pandemic — one experts fear could be deadlier than SARS-CoV-2 — though it's already a A catalyst for this backlash, MacIntyre says, were COVID lockdowns, which in Australia were enforced before vaccines were available to prevent the crises unfolding overseas — collapsing health systems, refrigerator trucks full of bodies, mass graves. But lockdowns have become conflated with any kind of public health measure — including face masks and vaccines — as "state-sponsored tools for control" and an attack on personal freedoms. As a result, MacIntyre writes, public health messaging has become "timid and apologetic", myths and misinformation have flourished unchecked, and "we now risk losing the gains of the last two centuries in a post-truth era embraced by the community and medical experts alike". Vaccines are easily taken for granted Together with improved sanitation, better nutrition, and antibiotics, vaccines have led to significant public health advances that are easily taken for granted. A Until then, infectious diseases were a leading cause of death, particularly among children. The Raina MacIntyre's Vaccine Nation is available from May 1st, 2025. ( Supplied: NewSouth Books ) But these gains are now under threat. Australia's childhood immunisation rates remain relatively high by global standards but fell in 2023 for the third consecutive year, the More research is needed to understand exactly what's driving these shifts: it's not all about COVID, nor is it all about MacIntyre also points the finger at doctors, including experts on vaccine advisory committees, some of whom she says have downplayed COVID's seriousness and fuelled vaccine misinformation. She is scathing, for instance, of "It's a 'I don't want mRNA in my body!' In a chapter called "I don't want mRNA in my body!" — a tongue-in-cheek nod to the fact that Crucially, COVID vaccines saved an estimated COVID vaccines saved an estimated 14.4 million lives globally just in the first year after they were rolled out. ( Supplied: WA Health ) Still, while the safety of COVID vaccines is well-established, they're not completely risk free — no vaccine or drug is. A study of . It may be of little comfort to That's not to say vaccine programs always go smoothly. In a chapter on vaccine safety MacIntyre explains the strict development process new vaccines undergo and the sophisticated monitoring systems large countries use to track adverse events — this surveillance is used to pick up rare side effects that aren't identified in clinical trials. But rollouts have occasionally revealed serious failures. One of the most infamous examples is the Tackling the politicisation of public health Seventy years later, despite the resounding success of COVID vaccines, we're now grappling with a confidence crisis on a bigger scale, driven by a tangle of factors: the Perhaps one of the most insidious examples of the challenge science now faces is the backlash MacIntyre has copped personally. Earlier in the pandemic, whenever she'd do media interviews, angry, abusive emails from complete strangers would come pouring into her inbox. They blamed her for lockdowns and, in one bizarre example, accused her of promoting masks and vaccines and causing mass deaths as a result. "F--- you, Raina. You are just so f---ing useless, like 95 per cent of females with 'careers'," one emailer spat. MacIntyre argues that "risk perception" ultimately drives human behaviour and tolerance for public health measures, vaccines included. ( ABC News: Brendan Esposito ) "I'm not sensitive at all because I know what I'm doing," MacIntyre insists. "I know what I say is based on evidence, on science … and I'm just not bothered by what anyone thinks or says about me. I also don't want negativity in my life … so if doing interviews is going to bring negativity, I don't need it, I don't want the attention." These days, she says, she'll do an interview if it's about a subject she thinks no one else understands the way she does: "If there's something I can contribute, I would like to. But there's also the question of, when people are over it, what's the point in being a talking head out there?" Still, things can be turned around, she says — especially in Australia, where as far as public health goes, "we're in a much stronger position than the US or UK". "I think some public messaging to consolidate the gains we already have is important, so we don't lose it in the sea of misinformation that will be coming in the near future," MacIntyre says. "I think the politicisation of public health" — reflected in political leaders' reluctance to mention COVID, for instance — is something we need to tackle." Photo shows A stock photo of a boy infected with measles. Australia is in the middle of a surge in measles cases amid a global spike and declining childhood vaccination rates. So what precautions should be taken to avoid widespread transmission? She also supports Other experts have suggested public confidence in vaccines could be bolstered by improving the governance and accessibility of vaccine injury compensation programs (many people who say they were injured by COVID shots Perversely, though, it may take people dying from resurgent, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles — or the onset of a bird flu pandemic — to really shift the dial. As MacIntyre writes, "risk perception" ultimately drives human behaviour and tolerance for public health measures, vaccines included. "When people see friends, family and neighbours dying or becoming seriously ill with pandemic influenza," she writes, "most will avail themselves of any available protective measures".
