Mum pleads for parents to get children vaccinated after son hospitalised 50 times

The mother of a five-year-old who has been hospitalised 50 times has urged others to get vaccinated.

Sydney mum Kathryn Lowe knows the best protection for her immunocompromised son Ambrose is “everyone else”.

Five-year-old Ambrose has been admitted to hospital around 50 times in his young life – most recently in April when he was gravely ill from whooping cough.

She said the effects of the highly infectious disease – characterised by a terrible, hacking cough – were terrifying.

“It’s scary. He couldn’t stop coughing,” Ms Lowe said, adding it was also distressing to see immunisation rates for vaccine-preventable diseases like whooping cough, falling.

While the national childhood immunisation coverage target is 95 per cent, rates have fallen across all age groups since peaking in 2020 – with one NSW community falling below 75 per cent.

Ambrose Lowe ended up in hospital with a severe case of whooping cough.

That’s coincided with a spike in disease – with doctors warning that whooping cough, Covid-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are all on the rise, with huge numbers of cases being recorded every week as vaccine hesitancy lingers post-pandemic.

So far this year, there have been 3338 cases of whooping cough in NSW alone – last year there were just 912 cases, and in 2022, just 84 recorded cases.

When it comes to the flu, 33,240 cases have been reported to the start of June, a jump of 13,000 cases on the same time last year. Meantime there’s been more than 44,000 cases of RSV in NSW this year, and almost 60,000 recorded cases of Covid-19.

“Ambrose’s best protection is the people around him,” Ms Lowe said.

“I have had to keep my son back from school purely because he has had about 50 hospital admissions already in his life.

“I knew if he went to school, he would be off all the time, and I was not ready to throw him into illness.”

She said it would be a different story if she knew a high percentage of kids were vaccinated – offering her son herd immunity.

“If everyone was vaccinated, I would be a lot more comfortable with him going to school. For Ambrose to stay alive, his best protection is everyone else,” she said.

Doctor Annette Munday, from Our Medical Gregory Hills, said part of the reason for the spike in preventable illness was that people were back out and about, not wearing masks, and all Covid restrictions had been dropped.

“Vaccinations have become a really hard sell post-Covid,” she said.

“Whooping cough is very serious – I read a medical journal where a woman was the only one of the seven kids in her family to survive a whooping cough outbreak in the early 1900s. That’s what used to happen and the disease is very much still here.”

Australian Medical Association president Michael Bonning said vaccination was key to protecting everyone but especially young children, where the disease was “most significant”.

“The challenge is ensuring everyone is getting vaccinated. When we see cases of whooping cough pass in communities, it’s not that each individual person is getting it from a different source, these cases are transmitted because of insufficient or out-of-date vaccination in communities,” he said.

“The most important thing we can do is ensure that people who are in caring roles, so fathers, mothers, grandparents, parents, grandparents, people with direct caring responsibilities for young children are getting vaccinated.”

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