Considered opinion: Truth decay & the anti-vaxxersAnti-vaxxers are spreading a virus that just won’t die

By Sarah Baxter

Published 11 April 2019

In 1995, Andrew Wakefield began researching a possible link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Sarah Baxter notes that he was a fraudster, and that he was struck off the medical register in Britain in 2010 but, after moving to the U.S., he has become something of a celebrity, and is supported in his bogus views by Donald Trump. In the past, some religious communities rejected vaccination, but now they have been joined the hippie-dippy boho middle class and the conspiracy-minded global far right. The result: a scary rise in dangerous infectious diseases which were on the verge of eradication.

There is a bronze statue of the sled dog Balto near the children’s zoo in Central Park, New York. It has stood there since 1925, the year the husky raced across the frozen wastes of Alaska to bring antitoxin serum to the remote town of Nome, where children were dying from diphtheria.

Sarah Baxter writes in the Sunday Times that Balto has been called into service once more to counter the anti-vaxxer mania sweeping America. She quotes a popular internet meme which said: “Balto didn’t bust his ass …to get those vaccines for dying children for you to send your kids to school without being vaccinated.”

“You have to wonder why people are behaving more ignorantly than nearly a century ago,” Baxter writes, adding:

In 1995, the year a much-loved cartoon film of Balto was released, Andrew Wakefield began researching a possible link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. He was struck off the medical register in Britain in 2010 but, after moving to the U.S., has become something of a celebrity. He now lives with Elle “the Body” Macpherson and is supported in his bogus views by Donald Trump.

The Americans have often fallen for medical conspiracies. Having laughed my head off at General Ripper’s fear in the Cold War film classic Dr Strangelove that fluoridation was a communist plot affecting his “precious bodily fluids”, I was amazed to find that huge swathes of the US remain without fluoride in the water to this day.

The British, though, can be just as gullible. Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, warned this month that parents from his daughter’s primary school were exchanging anti-vaccine texts on WhatsApp. One parent claimed: “My kids aren’t vulnerable and I think loading up on vaccines blocks their systems from fighting disease as it should do.”