Healthy debate

It is not hard to make the case that vaccination programmes have been one of the greatest contributions to mankind over the past century. It is sufficient simply to list the most common causes of death in 1915 of British children aged under five, in descending order: measles, bronchitis, whooping cough, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, infective enteritis and scarlet fever. Few parents in Britain now have to undergo the trauma of nursing a child suffering from any of these conditions, still less of burying a child who has died from one.

That these diseases have receded into history is down entirely to advances in medicine and public health. We have a health service which methodically inoculates children against infectious diseases at clearly defined stages of their development, capturing all socioeconomic groups. Near-universal coverage is crucial, because if the overwhelming majority of a population is inoculated, it helps to promote the effect of ‘herd immunisation’ — meaning that even those few children who slip through the net and are not vaccinated will not be exposed to the disease.

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All this has been known for decades. Yet for some people, the astonishing benefits of vaccination are a lesson which they seem determined not to learn. The ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement has instead managed to convince itself that vaccination is a form of oppressive government control over a country’s citizens. It is a deeply irresponsible falsehood being spread through social media and its effect can be traced in falling rates of take-up of the MMR vaccine and in rising numbers of measles cases: 259 in 2017, rising to 913 cases in the first ten months of last year. The number can be expected to rise. Just 87 per cent of British children have been vaccinated — below the level of 90 per cent that the World Health Organisation considers necessary for population-wide immunity.