Hanoi (VNA) -Medical experts are warning against what they see as an anti-vaccine campaignthat is being waged on social media.

A social media group with some 9,500 members, mostly parents of infants, hasbeen debating whether or not to get children vaccinated. 

Many parents have expressed concerns about cases in which children havesuffered abnormalities and complications after getting vaccinated, with some onthem proving fatal.

On March 25 last year, a five-year-old in the northern province of Ninh Binh’sYen Thang commune died after experiencing high fever, convulsions and panicattacks five days after getting the meningococcal (againstmeningitis) vaccine from a local clinic.

On March 6 the same year, a four-month-old in the southern province of Dong Nai’sThanh Phu commune also died four hours after getting the Quinvaxem vaccine (acombination vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B) at a localclinic.

Several parents have posted their belief that it is better to let children’simmune system develop normally rather than having through vaccinations,the Tien Phong (Vanguard) online newspaper reports.

The concerns about vaccine safety have been reinforced by some severe cases ofJapanese encephalitis over the last month.

These cases have seen children having epileptic attacks and even dying afterbeing vaccinated, the report says.

However, pediatricians say such concerns and views are groundless, and likelyto harm children far more than any real or imagined negative effects of vaccines.

Some 80 percent of children being treated at Children’s Hospital Number 1 inHCM City have not been vaccinated, noted Doctor Truong Huu Khanh, head of thehospital’s Department of Infection and Neurology.

“Abandoning vaccines will cause a disaster of diseases,” Khanh said, referringto the 2014 measles epidemic in Vietnam, believed to be triggered by parentswho did not get their children vaccinated.

“Side effects of vaccines occur in some children because each child has adifferent mechanism that reacts differently to vaccines,” he added. “It isbetter to minimise the side effects than abandon vaccines."

Without vaccines, child mortality would increase and those who survive diseaseswould have to live with disabilities for the rest of their lives, he warned.

Dr Phan Trong Lan, Director of the Pasteur Institute in HCM City, said thatbased on national reports on the effectiveness of vaccines, authorities wouldnot continue using vaccines that are harmful to citizens, especially children.

Lan said he understood mothers’ concerns on seeing abnormal physical symptomsappear in vaccinated infants, as well as their eagerness to find the cause ofthose symptoms.

“They have doubts, they seek information from everywhere. And before they canconclude what is right and what is wrong, they stop believing in the importanceof vaccines for young children,” he said.

“However, this is most dangerous, robbing children of their most importantopportunity to prevent diseases,” he said.

“For example, some 84 percent of children under six are at risk of dying frompertussis (whooping cough) without vaccines."-VNA