It’s rare that any government – not least Keir Starmer’s – does something to which there can be no even vaguely arguable objection. Today’s announcement that the NHS will begin vaccinating all babies against chickenpox next year is a rare exception. The vaccine rollout should be welcomed by everyone.
The only serious question that should be asked is why it has taken so long for us to seek to wipe out chickenpox
The only serious question that should be asked is why it has taken so long for us to seek to wipe out chickenpox. The vaccine is 98 per cent effective and, if taken up sufficiently, chickenpox will simply no longer happen in Britain.
But the operative words here are ‘if taken up sufficiently’, because while are no vaguely arguable objections, there are all too many unarguable objections spread by anti-vaxxers. Those objections have been dangerously successful in their impact.
One could, albeit ridiculously, argue that if parents wish to gamble with the health – and even the lives – of their children, so be it. But it is not only their own children’s health and lives they are gambling with; they risk that of every child. It is poignant timing that just 24 hours before the chickenpox announcement, it emerged that take up of the MMR vaccine – with which the chickenpox vaccine will be given – has fallen to just 84 per cent. For herd immunity, that figure should be at least 95 per cent.
Take up of other vaccines is also appallingly bad. The Hib/MenC vaccine, which protects against haemophilus influenzae type B and meningitis C, is down to 88 per cent for children in England aged five. And the vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV), linked to cervical and other cancers, as well as genital warts, is just 72 per cent for females and 67 per cent for males in year 8, when it is first given.
It is to the government’s credit that it is introducing the chickenpox vaccine, but as things stand the impact will be badly limited. This will be made worse by the push given to the anti-vaxxers through the appointment earlier this year of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is, to use the word of the moment, delulu when it comes to vaccines. It is deeply concerning how he is implementing his dangerous and unscientific agenda.
Under Kennedy’s watch $500 million (£376m) funding for mRNA vaccine projects (the basis of the Covid-19 vaccine) will be cancelled. Kennedy said he was pulling the funding following claims that ‘mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses’.
US president Donald Trump has also sacked Susan Monarez, the director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for – as she put it – refusing ‘to rubberstamp unscientific reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts’. Kennedy had earlier fired the CDC’s entire committee of 17 expert advisers and restricted access to the Covid-19 jab.
‘A massive testing and research effort’ to determine the cause of autism is also due to release its findings next month, according to Kennedy. Is there any doubt what these ‘findings’ will be, given that Kennedy has promoted debunked theories suggesting autism is linked to vaccines?
On Tuesday he told a US cabinet meeting: ‘We’re finding interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism.’ Trump replied: ‘There has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something… we’re going to do some things.’
That link was supposedly discovered by Andrew Wakefield in a 1998 study which underlies much of the rise of anti-vaxx ideology. His finding that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism was later found to be fraudulent and he was barred from practising medicine in the UK. No serious peer-reviewed study has ever found any such link, but it has become an article of faith now on the US MAGA right. And, as the MMR uptake figures here show, it has become equally influential here.
These vaccines are not only safe, they are scientific miracles that have benefitted humanity enormously. The success of the anti-vaxxers in pushing their ignorant, fear-mongering and alarming agenda should worry anyone who believes rationality should triumph over dogma and facts should supersede fiction. But how that fiction and that dogma is countered is a question that has yet to be properly addressed.
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