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.
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