Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

A dose of understanding

They may be dangerous, but anti-vaxxers still just want to protect their children

What a baffling group of people anti-vaxxers are. They rail against one of the miracles of modern medicine, peddling scare stories about vaccines which had nearly eradicated many deadly childhood illnesses in the developed world.

Baffling, of course, is too soft a word for many: they’re dangerous, because their anti-science views don’t just put their own children at risk, but wider society. The uptake of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in Britain is at 87.5 per cent. This sounds a lot, but isn’t close to the 95 per cent threshold that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says will ensure ‘herd immunity’ — which is when a disease cannot spread through a community. In the first six months of 2018, there were more than 41,000 cases of measles in Europe, nearly double the number over the whole of the previous year.

The WHO has named what it calls ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as one of the ten biggest threats to global health in 2019. In developing countries, parents are scared away from vaccines by superstition. In Britain, the anti-vax movement spreads through WhatsApp and Facebook. NHS England boss Simon Stevens said recently that parents at his children’s school were sharing fake stories about vaccines, and warned that this was ‘as irresponsible as it is to say don’t bother to tell your kids to look both ways before they cross the road’.

Magda Taylor is one of those British campaigners against vaccines. She runs a group called The Informed Parent, and in her eyes, the scientific community isn’t being open with parents about these problems, preferring to shout down anyone who raises concerns. Taylor and others often focus on the failure of medics to give parents the full details about the side effects of vaccinations, including very rare but potentially deadly allergic reactions.

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