Anti-vaxxers are spreading a virus that just won’t die

Stevens blamed the “vaccination deniers” for a five-year decline in protection rates and a tripling of measles cases across England last year. In Europe 80,000 people caught measles last year, a fourfold increase over 2017 (in Italy there was a certain satisfaction last week when a member of the populist League party who had opposed compulsory vaccination fell victim to chickenpox).

This isn’t our first brush with the anti-vaxxers. Before The Sunday Times exposed Wakefield as a fraud in 2004, I shared childcare with a friend who was adamantly opposed to vaccinating her children. “I felt I was being asked to put poison into my baby in order to protect the ‘herd’,” she said, “when, as a healthy-eating, middle-class girl, she was very unlikely to get those diseases.” Her own mother had been offered thalidomide for morning sickness in the 1960s and she felt she had every reason to distrust the medical establishment.

Later my friend wised up to the fact that the anti-vaccine movement was a “complete scam”, and all her children went on to receive jabs. However, she reckons there are a lot of 18 to 21-year-olds out there — the same age as her daughters — who were born at the time of the original Wakefield hysteria in Britain and could now be vulnerable to the devastation that measles can cause to pregnant women.

I’ve known measles can give rise to serious birth defects ever since I had to sit exams at home at 15 to protect a pregnant teacher, but I suffered only mild spots and a high fever. That’s how I learnt that the MMR isn’t just about me and you: it’s about those we might infect. It could be your child or your grandchild who is damaged later in life. Wakefield’s dirty work won’t be over for generations.

The herd immunity that my friend took for granted is breaking down under pressure from other causes, too, such as the arrival of unvaccinated immigrants and resistance to jabs among certain religious communities. But the hippie-dippy boho middle class has been joined in its suspicion of vaccines by the conspiracy-minded global far right.

Baxter notes that, predictably, social media have played their part in the proliferation of anti-vaccine propaganda. Stevens has suggested Instagram and YouTube ban all such harmful content, but Baxter says that after Facebook, correctly, promised last month to block support for white nationalism and separatism in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks, she is wary of adding to the list of censored items.

She concludes:

At the same time, the potential for bullying doctors and patients on the internet is enormous. A fascinating experiment took place in Pennsylvania recently after a local doctor’s surgery posted a Facebook video urging parents to vaccinate their children against the human papillomavirus (HPV). Soon 10,000 vicious comments along the lines of “vaccines kill” piled up on the site. With the help of researchers from Pittsburg University, the doctors found that only five came from Pennsylvania. Others came from all over the world as part of a coordinated attack.

For Rockland county, in New York state, the answer to an outbreak of 153 measles cases last week was to ban unvaccinated children from all public places for a month. Admittedly there are no guards at shopping malls to enforce compliance, but it does seem a little draconian.

My preferred solution would be to insist on compulsory vaccinations for schoolchildren — without exception. Yes, we’re big on “our bodies, our choice” in Britain, but one person’s poor decision can disable another person for life. It’s no different, to my mind, from the wearing of seatbelts. Feel free to gamble with your own children’s lives. Not mine.

Read the article: Sarah Baxter, “Anti-vaxxers are spreading a virus that just won’t die,” Sunday Times (31 March 2019)