Vaccines facing misinformation spike: WHO experts

GENEVA:

Vaccine programmes are being challenged by rising misinformation and an uncertain pipeline for research funding, the World Health Organization's immunisation experts said Wednesday.

And the war in the Middle East will likely hamper the fight against polio, the WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation (SAGE) said.

The group held its biannual meeting last week, focusing on Covid-19 jab recommendations, typhoid vaccine dosing schedules and oral polio vaccine doses in routine immunisation.

"Emerging challenges for the future include uncertain funding for vaccine research and development, and misinformation and distorted information that erodes public trust in vaccines," said SAGE.

"Protecting trust and countering misinformation will be a central focus in 2026."

WHO vaccines chief Kate O'Brien said resources would be targeted this year on protecting the roll-out of core immunisation programmes.

"We're in a really deeply changing world for infectious diseases and for vaccine programmes," she said, due to conflicts, economic challenges and health budgets being cut.

Trust in vaccines is being "threatened by misinformation", she told a press conference.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US health chief, has long voiced anti-vaccine rhetoric and inaccurate claims connecting vaccines and autism.

A WHO review of all available evidence issued in December reaffirmed there is no link between vaccines and autism — contrary to the theories being propagated in the United States and beyond.

"Vaccines do not cause autism and they never have caused autism," stressed O'Brien.

She said vaccines had saved 154 million lives over the past 50 years, and more than 30 diseases could be prevented through immunisation.

"The risk is about backsliding, or even countries deciding that they can't afford all of the vaccines that are in their programme," she said.

The group voiced concern over the ongoing transmission of wild poliovirus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the persistent detection of vaccine-derived type-2 poliovirus in several African countries, a strain related to the weakened live poliovirus contained in oral polio vaccines.