Recently, actress and controversial self-proclaimed Islamic cleric Oki Setiana Dewi sparked a vaccination debate in Indonesia after it emerged that she is supposedly an anti-vaxxer.
Renowned pro-vaccination pediatrician and founder of the Rumah Vaksin vaccination clinics, Dr Piprim Basarah Yanuarso, last week openly called out Oki for her supposed stance against giving vaccinations to her children. This was after it was reported in the news that Oki’s two daughters suffered from measles, despite Piprim claiming that he had previously warned Oki to vaccinate her children.
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In an interview with the media yesterday, Piprim lamented the fact that a celebrity like Oki could be an anti-vaxxer. Piprim expressed his worry that if celebrities could promote the misguided movement to the general public, then herd immunity through vaccination could be compromised.
“Anti-vaccination campaigns are dangerous. If many are against (vaccination), there could be new outbreaks even though we have been able to control them well,” Piprim said, as quoted by Liputan 6.
Piprim added that, should less than 40% of the public is vaccinated, we could expect to see outbreaks of diseases thought to be extinct in Indonesia.
Piprim recalled that, in 2012, an anti-vaccination movement in Padang, West Sumatra, led to a drastic decrease in vaccinations for diphtheria infections. As a result, diphtheria claimed one victim in 2015 and six others were found to have the infection and were suspected of infecting dozens more in the area. The government then took the extraordinary measure of vaccinating hundreds of thousands from the virus in Padang and its surrounding areas following the outbreak.
In Indonesia, as in many other countries, there are several reasons why people choose to be anti-vaccination, such as the belief that certain vaccines can cause autism in children (which has been thoroughly debunked by medical experts). But there is also another reason more specific to Indonesia, and other Muslim majority countries, which is that some believe that vaccines contain traces of substances derived from pigs, which are forbidden for consumption in Islam. This has been denied by the Indonesian Pediatric Society.
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