on Wednesday Scare stories can damage your health
I’VE been vaccinated. Sadly not against the dreaded Covid-19, but against the flu. This autumn I have made the time to have the jab. Fears that a serious winter flu epidemic could overwhelm the NHS when it needs to keep beds clear for coronavirus patients was all it took to persuade me. The procedure cost £18 – which looks like good value if it stops me losing a fortnight to a nasty bug this winter – but would be no small sum to some people. For many more this year, however, it will be free. They should take it up.
The vaccination was administered by a very nice young man from Madrid, who is our local pharmacist. In excellent English – albeit delivered at breakneck Spanish speakers’ speed – he told me that when we have a vaccination against coronavirus, which could be as soon as December, he’ll be administering that too. Put me down for one as soon as they are available, I told him.
I am sure I will be joining a very long queue. Long enough – if the vaccine proves effective – to include enough people to ensure that even those conspiracy theorists who refuse to have the vaccination will be protected too. Because there is a growing danger that there will be a small but significant number who, fed a diet of untruths and scare stories peddled on social media, will be shunning the Covid jab, leaving it up to the rest of us to provide the herd immunity that beating this disease requires.
As a journalist I like to think I am a committed defender of the freedom of speech. But I can think of few more heinous crimes than speaking out against vaccination. It runs the risk of persuading otherwise rational people to spurn an injection that can
save their lives or the lives of their children.
My parents, born in the 1930s, were the first generation to benefit from the national health service as adults and my mother made sure she took advantage of every bit of healthcare advice, treatment and innoculation that was going as I was growing up. So I was dosed regularly on free orange juice and delicious Delrosa rosehip syrup, high in vitamin C and – as I recall – available for a while on the health service for growing children. I was protected against tetanus, a terrifying disease for any accident-prone youngster who loved to play outside and more often known by its scarier name – lockjaw.
Measles, mumps and Rubella, which we called German measles (the war and the 1966 World Cup were still fresh in our memories) could not be innoculated against, so we had to catch those to get lifetime protection.
But there were other jabs and minor procedures and examinations, from the nit nurse to the doctor, who held your unmentionables and asked you to cough, that made alarming interludes in the school year, but helped keep us healthy. There was also the dentist for regular check-ups and dreaded fillings.
None of it, from the jabs in our skinny arms to the exploration of our mouths and our unkempt hair, was especially welcome. But it all played a part in keeping us safe and spotting trouble before it could advance.
The fact that since 1948 it was free may have been one reason that my mother was so keen for our family to get our fair share, but it undoubtedly helped enormously to improve the health of my generation and those that have come along since.
Dr Andrew Wakefield, the now disgraced doctor who published a flawed paper in 1998 claiming to link the MMR vaccine with bowel disease and autism has a lot to answer for. His now totally discredited paper, first carried and later withdrawn, by The Lancet, was the spark for recent and still growing distrust in vaccinations. Children may well have died as a result of what he did.
A ragbag of the ill-informed and those with more sinister motives have continued his appalling misinformation, surfacing most recently at anti-vax rallies with bizarre and often bonkers claims about what a coronavirus vaccine might do to us. They are easy to dismiss. But in these unstable times, people are susceptible to misinformation and scare stories.
We need to keep speaking out against them. They are free and always will be to refuse to be vaccinated. But they cannot be allowed to unduly influence others. We can’t shut them up. We can speak up for what’s right. And we can get the vaccination ourselves and get protected – for them as well as for us.