Public health and vaccination

There could well be a case for having a public agency focused comprehensively on vaccination and communicable disease. 

But the proposal that the folks over at Public Health Expert isn't that. In a post framed around the recent measles outbreak and noting the risks around antimicrobial resistance and pandemics, we get this conclusion:

Business as usual is not a rational or viable option for NZ. There are almost daily reminders about the large current and impending public health challenges faced by this country. These challenges include the health consequence of persistent inequalities, the increasing burden from rising obesity and non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, and persisting problems of poor mental health and suicide. Possibly even more alarming are the rising environmental consequences of climate change and ecological collapse that take us beyond ‘planetary boundaries’, and emerging infectious diseases including rising levels of antimicrobial resistance and the emerging coronavirus pandemic. The current national measles epidemic is just another reminder that our national public health capacity and systems are no longer fit for purpose.

The good news is that the present Health and Disability System Review could map out the design for a new kind of public health agency to lead the transformative change that NZ needs to achieve its goals of improved public health and equity, and support its shift to a sustainable future.  Public Health Aotearoa could well provide the high quality sustained public health leadership needed to eliminate measles, improve our health security, and manage other long-term public health challenges.

It would be ...surprising... if this kind of agency maintained any kind of focus on pandemic prevention and vaccination promotion. It would quickly instead become an agency pushing for greater controls around lifestyle issues related to noncommunicable disease and, from the description above, social justice issues. And when that shift resulted in another great forgetting of the importance of vaccination and core public health, it would complain come the next measles outbreak that it simply hadn't had enough funding.

I could rather strongly favour there being an agency solely responsible for reducing the risk of communicable disease. That's core public health work. It would encourage research into vaccination uptake - finding ways to get folks vaccinated who are averse to vaccination. It would have targets around vaccination rates. It would make sure that public health nurses get into the schools to make vaccination routine. If it ever came to it, it could help coordinate quarantine regimes.

I really like the kinds of things that Nick Wilson writes about pandemics and preparedness. But I have no confidence that a new public health agency would pay any attention to pandemics or vaccination rates outside of a crisis.

Like, why would it be any different than the general focus of the current regime, in which it is dead simple to find millions of dollars in grants to Otago Uni to run focus groups about smoking (while Marewa does the real work out on her own) but hard to find much evidence of support for research into encouraging vaccination?

I'd put in an OIA request last year asking the Ministry of Health to list any research it's commissioned around vaccination. This is what I got back. It isn't much, despite waning vaccination rates.

Vaccination just seems to be low priority until there's a crisis. I wonder whether one tobacco researcher, by herself, has gotten more funding than the whole vaccination research agenda noted below.