There’s nothing hip about leaving your children vulnerable to diseases
It’s easy to poke fun at hipsters: at the beards, and the eye-wateringly expensive pop-up restaurants, and the outraged social politics expressed by people slyly sending their children to private school and watching their house prices rocket. But hypocrisy is one thing. Let him who is not a hypocrite cast the first stone. It’s the piety that’s truly galling, the sanctimony of those who think they have identified a better way of life, but are really just indulging themselves like everyone else.
Until recently the most glaring example of this was drugs. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick talked earlier this summer about “people who will sit round happily thinking about global warming and environmental protection and organic food, but think there is no harm in taking a bit of cocaine”.
Coca and cacao, what a difference a letter makes.
Now, however, there is a new hipster holiness to drive the rest of us up the wall: vaccinations. According to new NHS data, the proportion of children receiving the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine has fallen for the fourth successive year. Just 87 per cent of five-year-olds in England have had the two recommended MMR doses. That’s a problem because measles herd immunity, which helps prevent mass outbreak, is estimated to require 93-95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated.
Rates were lowest in London, with less than 80 per cent of children vaccinated in boroughs such as Hackney. If you talk to those who study so-called “vaccine hesitancy” they will joke that Hackney residents are “the worse vaccinators in the world”. That’s down to a whole host of reasons, from ultra-Orthodox Jewish mothers of 10 struggling to find the time, to simple poverty. But there is something chilling about the home of the hipster also being ground zero for Britain’s anti-vaxxers.
Indeed, it is symptomatic of something scary happening across the developed world. Because while money, access and religion are the typical barriers to immunisation in poorer countries, virulent new strains of faddish, fashionable reluctance are emerging in the rich world - where, by no coincidence, new parents can no longer remember what a polio victim looks like.
The most significant concern among parents is about safety. Vaccines, like all medicines, can have side effects. In vanishingly rare cases these can be serious. And there is no doubt that health authorities need to communicate so much better, because on social media a single emotional story trumps a whole warehouse of empirical data, or eye-popping numbers like the estimated 5million lives vaccines save each year.
But still, even if people who worry about vaccine safety are terrible at calculating risk, they are at least making a calculation.
It’s another group who are truly enraging. Because according to the WHO, the second biggest barrier to vaccination in the rich world is
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion “beliefs and attitudes about health”. Not religion or culture, or awareness or access or money, but “attitudes about health”. It is, in other words, a lifestyle choice to go with the homeopathic eyedrops, nutribullet kale and quinoa zesty longlife shakes and paleo diet (primordial soup to start). The difference is that this one has consequences for us all. It might make them feel good, but it has every chance of making your children feel bad
Europe is currently experiencing a significant measles outbreak - with twice as many cases in the first half of this year as the whole of last. England has seen almost 900 cases, three times the total for 2017. The new trendies might dismiss that and say, well, measles is just an irritant, and everyone used to get it a generation ago without consequence. The truth is that in 1980, 2.5 million people died of measles around the world; a number which has been reduced to 75,000 or so because of vaccines. Though 75,000 is still quite a lot of children who don’t need to die, isn’t it?
Today, there will be too many people who spent last night unwrapping a gram of blow and who will this lunchtime unwrap their organic beef from the farmers’ market; people who insist that vaccination isn’t natural, and that they prefer to raise their children in a healthier, earthier way.
They might be seeking a simpler, purer, less selfish life. But the reality is that they are surfing on and diminishing the protection offered by others. Instead of simplicity, theirs is the height of decadence - a luxurious self-indulgence in a world where medical miracles have so cossetted them that they are forgetting the basics of life and death.
If Britain in the 1800s was a “nation of shopkeepers”, in Napoleon’s apocryphal phrase, then we surely spent much of the 20th century as keen trainspotters. In 1942, Southern Rail clerk Ian Allen published his first alphabetical booklet of engine numbers, making trainspotting a national hobby, as millions of boys (and the occasional girl) flocked to stations, filling endless notebooks with abstruse new train classifications.
Steam engines may have had their day, yet UK policy-makers remain trainspotting anoraks of the highest order, their political and financial energies fixated on Britain’s railways. Rail accounts for less than 7 per cent of total passenger miles, but receives more funding than national and local roads put together. This myopic focus on rail ignores reality. Electric car technology is maturing rapidly, with burgeoning sales worldwide. The four millionth vehicle was reportedly sold earlier this month. This may not sound much, but it represents dramatic recent uptake. The first million vehicles were sold over five years, the last million in just six months. This week, a new study forecasts UK vehicle numbers to grow by over 50 per cent by 2050.
A similar revolution is unfolding across the Atlantic. Earlier this year, California approved fully driverless cars for testing on public roads. In neighbouring Arizona, hundreds of autonomous vehicles are already in
‘The second biggest barrier to vaccination in the rich world is “beliefs and attitudes about health”. It is, in other words, a lifestyle choice’
‘Successive governments have viewed the common motorist as part-cash cow, partpest, with drivers beset with interventions to complicate their journeys and “nudge” them towards public transport’
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion