Brandon TurbevilleNatural Blaze
May 18, 2018
It has long been known that clean water and sanitation lead to better health among the human population. However, vaccine nazis have for just as long attempted to deny the correlation and argue that the increase standards of public health were due to vaccines. Among unbiased researchers, however, that perception cannot help but go unchallenged.
In 2016, a number of researchers wrote to The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene to question the effectiveness of the oral cholera vaccine deployed in Haiti. To be clear, the researchers were not questioning the safety of the vaccine or vaccines in general but that the effectiveness of the vaccine had been overestimated by previous research teams.
Their argument was that the vaccine was tested alongside increased sanitation practices, possibly over-inflating the success rate of the shot. They argued that the vaccine should have been tested and evaluated by itself.
The researchers wrote:
Oral cholera vaccination (OCV) has been validated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a valuable tool to complement water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) activities in cholera prevention for high-risk areas and populations.1 We read with great interest the recent study published by Sévère and others,2 which evaluated the effectiveness of a mass OCV campaign targeting approximately 70,000 inhabitants in several slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, between April and June 2012. The authors reported a 75% vaccine coverage and, using a cohort design, a striking 97.5% vaccine effectiveness in the 37 months postvaccination, whereas controlled clinical trials have measured OCV vaccine efficacy around 57% [95% confidence interval, 44–67%] during the first 2 years.3 Although it was expected that 56% of cholera cases would occur among vaccinated individuals according to the WHO screening method,4 the same proportion was 5% in the Sévère and others cohort.
