User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Timeline of events related to vaccine hesitancy

This is a timeline of selected events related to vaccine hesitancy, anti-vaxxers, and vaccine refusers. The World Health Organization defines vaccine hesitancy as a "delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services." In a 2015 WHO publication, authors described vaccine hesitancy as a "complex and context specific varying across time, place, and vaccines" which includes factors such as complacency, convenience, and confidence."


 * 1971 The MMR vaccine—a combined vaccination that provided immunity against the measles, mumps, and rubella viruses—was developed by Maurice Hilleman of the Merck Institute of Therapeutic Research in 1971.


 * 1976 The unsuccessful 1976 mass inoculation campaign, in response to the Swine influenza outbreak in 1976, resulted in an "enduring public backlash against flu vaccination", the firing of David J. Sencer, then director of what is now called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and was the source of embarrassment to then-US President Gerald Ford's administration. The $137-million mass campaign began in early October and 40 million Americans received the vaccine. The vaccination program was abruptly ended when 500 people who had received the vaccine developed a rare neurological condition—Guillain-Barre syndrome resulting in 25 deaths. Those affected and their families received millions in damages from the federal government. Ultimately there were only 200 cases of swine flu and only one death. Experts had erroneously predicted that the flu pandemic "could infect 50 million to 60 million Americans." Originally, concerns were raised that the virus causing swine flu, which was "thought to be similar" to the strain of virus—the H1N1 influenza A virus—that caused the deadly 1918–1920 global influenza pandemic—known as the Spanish flu or the Great Influenza epidemic. The Spanish flu had resulted in about 500 million suspected cases and 25–50 million deaths.


 * 1998 Andrew Wakefield's 1998 research paper, published in the The Lancet instigated the MMR scare that "led to a dramatic drop in MMR vaccination rates and a rise in cases of measles", according to the 2010 findings of a 2-year long investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC). According to a 20 April 2020 systematic review in the The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews journal, by 2020, the decrease in the number of children being vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella had continued to decrease, because some people continued to believe—without evidence—that the "MMR vaccine causes unwanted effects such as autism, swelling of the brain (encephalitis), meningitis, learning difficulties, type 1 diabetes, and other conditions." A 2011 British Medical Journal reported that Wakefield was "guilty of deliberate fraud—as he and his research team had picked and chose data that suited their case, while falsifying facts in their studies.


 * 29 January 2010 The General Medical Council revoked Wakefield's medical license and removed him from the medical register, and ruled that Wakefield had failed to "disclose his role as a paid adviser in a lawsuit claiming MMR had harmed children" to The Lancet when he submitted his 1998 Lancet paper that "sparked the MMR scare". The GMC investigation found that he had "abused his position of trust" when he "carried out clinically unnecessary and invasive tests on children [on the autism spectrum] without ethical approval or appropriate qualifications".


 * April 2014 Researchers published a literature review in the journal Vaccine of "vaccine hesitancy around vaccines and vaccination from a global perspective" covering the period 2007 to 2012. The Vaccine article said that at that time, 'vaccine hesitancy' was an "emerging issue", which had not yet been clearly defined. The literature revealed that there was a lack of strategies "explicitly designed to address vaccine hesitancy". The review examined how various forms of dialogue might influence vaccine hesitation, including the impact of "religious or traditional leader involvement", social mobilisation, social media, mass media, "communication tool-based training for health care workers", and "information-based healthcare worker training".


 * The Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group 20 April 2020 systematic review published in the The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews journal was an "update of two previous reviews, one in 2005 and a second in 2012". Researchers investigated the "effectiveness, safety, and long‐ and short‐term adverse effects" associated with the MMR and MMRV and included "138 studies with 23,480,668 participants". Researchers reported that the vaccines effectively prevented infections in children. They found "no evidence of an association between MMR immunisation" and autistic spectrum disorders, encephalitis or encephalopathy.