Stats SA has defended its population data, which the National Department of Health said last week may have skewed its estimates of childhood vaccination coverage – and which reflected that more than 30% of babies under 12 months had not been immunised, reports Business Day.
Numerous health experts have since flagged the crisis.
The Health Department had told Business Day there was uncertainty over the mid-year population estimates provided by Stats SA and that it had launched a process to review their accuracy, but Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke said Stats SA stood by the accuracy of its figures, including the census and the mid-year population estimates.
The mid-year population estimates are derived from the 2002 census, which had a historically high under-count of 31%. It was criticised by UCT demographers for a host of anomalies and several municipalities challenged its estimates of their populations.
“This is … not the first time Stats SA’s population figures have been questioned and the nature of the questioning itself illustrates why they should be trusted,“ Maluleke said.
“If the Statistician-General were to revise official population figures each time a different interest group asserted they were wrong, in different and often contradictory directions, the independence and methodological soundness on which these official statistics are built, and on which the country relies, would be lost,” he said.
Public health experts in Tshwane, Cape Town and Johannesburg said not only was there no evidence of a surge in hospital admissions of unvaccinated babies and toddlers, but health workers have been unable to identify significant numbers of “zero dose” babies who are completely unvaccinated, according to Tshwane district paediatrician Ute Feucht.
“Our immunisation programme has certainly not collapsed. They (vaccines) are all in stock, they are free and they are accessible,” Feucht said.
Wits professor of vaccinology Shabir Madhi said there had been no notable increase in unvaccinated children being admitted to hospital, while Stellenbosch University professor of public health Hassan Mahomed said the national health department’s data were problematic, as academic research conducted in the Western Cape had found higher immunisation rates.
The reliability of the mid-year population estimates has also been questioned by Neva Makgetla, senior economist at Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies, who pointed to a widening divergence between these data and the number of live births registered by Home Affairs.
The mid-year population estimates for babies under the age of one increased from 1.06m to 1.15m between 2020 and 2024, while the number of registered births fell from 1.02m to 799 000 over this period, Makgetla said.
The Health Department should ideally run a community survey to obtain a reliable measure of vaccination coverage before embarking on costly interventions to reverse an apparent decline that might not hold true, she added.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Dodgy childhood vaccination data prompts department review
Growing concern over drop in infant immunisations