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c underdog, cruelly dical establishment. dy since Wakefield’s d any link between the tism. The most recent per investigating more n over 10 years, found oever. kefield exploits his us – he dates superon and was invited to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration ball – to insist there is a massive conspiracy to force vaccines upon our children.
Oozing charisma, but with a distinct lack of irony, Wakefield, himself a proven doctorcharlatan, insists you cannot trust doctors to tell the truth. The facts speak otherwise.
It is undeniably the case that no doctor can claim vaccines are always, in all circumstances, entirely safe. Exceptionally rarely, as with any medicine or food, vaccines may
through this ordeal. My younger sister also contracted the disease, aged six. She was desperately ill, and spent time in Snapethorpe isolation hospital. We weren’t allowed to visit.
My husband Paul, the Mirror journalist, and I are glad and proud our granddaughters have definitely had the jab.
This is a wake-up call for mothers. With all my heart I appeal to you: Do the right thing by your children, don’t take the risk of this horrible disease. Take up the full programme of preventative medicine that the NHS offers.
You owe it to them. cause the severe allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, meaning they can, in theory, kill.
But a study of the 117 million vaccines given in the UK from 1997 to 2003 showed 130 reports of anaphylaxis. The overall rate of anaphylaxis is therefore only one in 900,000 – almost literally one in a million.
Many parents worry about less dramatic harms to their children. Mild and temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fever or vomiting are more common. Around one in 10 children will experience these. In around one in 10,000 children, fits known as febrile convulsions, may occur. These can be extremely distressing for parents but, again, do not have long-term side-effects.
That leaves chemicals: the idea that in vaccinating our babies, we are pumping them full of toxic substances like mercury and aluminium. Both are present in vaccines, although in tiny traces.
The former acts as a preservative, the latter helps strengthen the immune system’s response to the vaccine. But the quantities of each are so minuscule, they carry no risk.
Every successful conspiracy theory taps into a wider concern, in this case, a reluctance among some parents to expose their children to artificial or unnatural substances. In
We must guard our babies against deadly measles risk
Former medic Andrew Wakefield with his girlfriend Elle Macpherson
a way, I can empathise. I well remember, when weaning my babies, pureeing and freezing cubes of organic spinach, as though I might somehow be a less-than-perfect mother otherwise. It is easy to see how the desire for your children to grow up naturally might evolve into resistance to vaccines.
Finally, some parents fear that vaccines will overwhelm a child’s immune system. But from the moment of birth, our bodies are flooded with micro-organisms. We are invaded by viruses, bacteria and foreign bodies in their billions every day.
Most doctors are surprisingly lax about their children rolling in dirt and eating bugs. We know exposure to pathogens strengthens an immune system. I have never yet met a UK doctor who has not vaccinated their child.
If vaccines really were a plot dreamed up by big pharma to fleece us in our millions, we would be the first to smell a rat.
But, ironically, vaccination has become almost too successful for its own good. For scaremongers like Wakefield, their greatest weapon is the lack of hard, bloody, shocking evidence of the devastation unleashed by diseases like measles. We have developed a collective amnesia: why should we fear what we have never even seen in our lifetimes?
As recently as the 1950s, hospitals were full of children incarcerated for months in iron lungs, the polio virus having paralysed them so they could not breath unaided.
In 1962, author Roald Dahl lost his sevenyear-old daughter, Olivia, to measles with heartbreaking swiftness. He wrote: “I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it... Then one morning, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked her. ‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.” If you had seen, as I have, a child die from meningitis, or a young woman from cervical cancer, instead of fearing vaccines, you might feel blessed your children live in an era where they can be spared such horrors.
It is far from easy to stay objective when small armies of trolls are terrorising parents with lurid disinformation on social media.
But, please, if you don’t know who to trust about vaccines, have a face-to-face chat with a nurse or doctor. After all, we didn’t join the NHS to get rich quick or to sow political turmoil.
We just want to help, not judge, people. ■ For more information go to: nhs.uk/ conditions/vaccinations/
ROALD DAHL AUTHOR TALKING OF HIS DAUGHTER’S DEATH FROM MEASLES
‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said. In an hour she was unconscious, in 12 she was dead