The anti-jab bedtime story
On the world’s biggest shopping site, a children’s book edited by a British homeopath — and printed by Amazon itself — that warns children against vaccination
Helen Kimball- Brooke doesn’t look like the sort of rabble-rouser you’d expect to find masterminding a subversive propaganda campaign that will poison children’s minds and endanger their health.
A 72-year- old grandmother, she lives with her hedge fund executive husband, Robert Brooke, in a five- bedroom, £2.5 million house on a tree-lined street just off ealing Common in West london.
Robert commutes daily to the City offices of investment firm Man GlG, where he works as a highly paid senior adviser on Japan.
Helen, who cuts a similarly conservative figure, runs a ‘wellness’ clinic called Healing in ealing, where the professional homeopath and ‘life coach’ charges clients about £90 an hour.
A keen gardener, the American-born mother of two loves tending her vegetable patch, which during the summer and autumn produces marrows, courgettes and runner beans.
Yet Kimball- Brooke has another interest, quite at odds with the outwardly respectable nature of her existence. She is a leading player in the strident and (critics say) highly irresponsible global anti-vaccination movement.
like many homeopaths, who tend to distrust mainstream medical science, Kimball-Brooke is convinced that jabs harm children, using her Twitter feed to declare (wrongly) that they ‘don’t prevent illness’ and are ‘hazardous’.
She also shares seemingly endless petitions calling for a ‘vaccine-free world’ and castigating ‘Big Pharma’ for profiting from ‘medical tyranny’.
Her professional website links to an array of pages which promote the false claim that MMR jabs cause autism, while on Facebook she promotes ‘international vaccine injury awareness day’ and posts articles from naturalnews.com, a U.S. website recently dubbed ‘one of the largest brokers of far-Right conspiracy theories, including disinformation about vaccines’. DEPRESSINGLY, in the unregulated echo chambers of social media, where facts go unchecked and falsehoods are amplified, such activity is common. It is at least partly to blame for the worrying fall in vaccination rates, which in the UK meant more than half a million children missing out on the MMR jab between 2010 and 2017.
Today, vaccination rates stand at 86.4 per cent — well below the 95 per cent required to achieve the ‘herd immunity’ that will protect babies and those with medical conditions that mean they cannot be inoculated.
Anti- vaccine myths are also partly to blame for a rise in measles cases. The disease struck 991 children last year, treble the 2015 total. However, Kimball-Brooke’s influence is not restricted to the Wild West of cyberspace.
Her discredited views about immunisation are also shared via a bizarre children’s picture book called Sarah Doesn’t Want To Be Vaccinated.
The £ 10 paperback, which Kimball- Brooke edited, was published in 2015 and has been translated into French, German, Danish, Italian, Russian and Dutch. It appears to have been designed as bedtime reading to help adult members of the ‘ antivax’ movement convince their children vaccination is dangerous.
This disturbing propaganda is not only sold but also printed in the UK, by Amazon — which MPs and public health campaigners have said raises serious questions about the tax-avoiding internet giant’s moral compass.
Sarah Doesn’t Want To Be Vaccinated is the story of a little blonde girl whose parents refuse to let her have childhood jabs because, they say, ‘a lot of people have gotten really sick from vaccination’.
Her parents also take the view that, should you fall sick and then recover from a childhood illness such as measles, you end up ‘even healthier than you were before’.
That’s assuming you are not one of those measles patients (roughly one in a thousand) who die, or end up with encephalitis (a similar ratio), or suffer life- changing complications from the disease.
In the book, we learn that Sarah’s medical history means she is unable to go on a ‘Girl Scout’ camping trip, as to do so she must have an immunisation record.
A conflict ensues between her parents and the villain of the tale: the local GP. He is portrayed as a large, brooding man who conceals an enormous syringe behind his back and is trying to ‘ scare’ children into getting vaccinated.
naturally, there is a happy ending: our young heroine is eventually allowed to go to Scout camp. By way of a twist in the tale, Sarah’s best friend lucy, who has had the MMR jab, has to go home early from the trip after falling ill.
It later emerges that she has caught measles, a development which seems intended to demonstrate to young readers that (to quote the book) the measles vaccine ‘doesn’t even work’.
The final pages of this bizarre text — originally published in German by fellow homeopath Andreas Bachmair — contain an array of pseudo-medical notes for parents, containing many claims that are demonstrably false.
These include the contention that measles vaccinations are only 84 per cent effective a year after they are given. The correct figure, according to the Royal College of GPs, is 98.1 per cent.
These pages also contain a section suggesting that MMR is linked to autism — which cites the work of Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 controversially published a paper in The lancet suggesting such a link, based on a study of just 12 children.
The book fails to mention, in this context, that elements of Wakefield’s study were found to have been falsified and it was withdrawn by the lancet.
neither do her medical notes point out that Wakefield was then struck off by the General Medical Council for failing to disclose serious conflicts of interest during his research, including that he was being funded by solicitors pursuing a legal action against manufacturers of the MMR vaccine.
nor that 21 subsequent studies, all far more wide-ranging than his, have failed to find any evidence of a link between MMR and autism, the most recent being a Danish one that looked at more than 650,000 children — 649,988 more than Wakefield based his study on.
The reason for these oversights is anyone’s guess. Kimball-Brooke did not respond when the Mail contacted her seeking comment.
Public health campaigners weren’t nearly so reticent, though.
‘I’m incredibly concerned by the decline of vaccination rates and it’s unacceptable that anyone should try to undermine our efforts to protect children,’ Health
Secretary Matt Hancock tells me.
‘Spreading disinformation among parents is bad enough, but targeting children directly with anti- vax propaganda is beyond the pale. This can, and will, cost lives.’
Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, branded the book ‘full of inacccuracies, of misleading statements’. SHE added: ‘I’m mystified by the agenda of the author . . . incorporating these dangerous and irresponsible messages about vaccination into a children’s book is an underhand and stealthy way of perpetuating them, targeting parents and playing on their anxieties.’
The Royal Society of Public Health said the book has ‘ an agenda of misleading children and parents, seriously misrepresenting how severe diseases like measles are, and spreading categorically false statements about what vaccines do’.
Leading academics described
Kimball-Brooke’s work as ‘sinister and dangerous’.
Edzard Ernst, Emeritus Professor of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, called it ‘a vile anti- vaccination pamphlet’ , adding: ‘Its author is a homeopath who trivialises the seriousness of measles infection, while exaggerating the dangers of vaccinations to a degree where they are made to look as doing more harm than good’.
Helen Bedford, Professor of Children’s Health at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, said it was ‘very concerning’ that such a book has been published, telling me: ‘A more accurate title would be “Sarah’s parents don’t want her to be vaccinated and they are going to indoctrinate her too, leaving her at risk of serious diseases like measles”.’
Jonathan Kennedy, Senior
Lecturer in Global Health at Queen Mary University of London, declared it ‘full of statements about vaccines and infectious diseases that almost all medical professionals would agree are misleading or false’.
He added that it is ‘ shocking’ that a company with the power and influence of Amazon has printed and sells the book.
‘The fact it’s aimed at children is particularly worrying. It’s one thing to write for adults, who are — in theory at least — able to study evidence and reach a reasoned decision. But it’s quite another to produce misinformation on vaccines that appears to be specifically aimed at influencing young minds.’
Which brings us to perhaps the most important issue raised by Kimball- Brooke’s foray into children’s literature.
For while dubious literature seeking to spread misinformation has existed for as long as the printing press, her exercise in antivaccine propaganda is a very modern example of the genre — for it owes its existence to the internet giant Amazon. The world’s largest retailer doesn’t just sell Sarah Doesn’t Want To Be Vaccinated but prints it in Britain, according to a copyright note inside the book’s cover.
Which means the U.S. giant is not only profiting from but actively producing this piece of misleading anti-vaccine propaganda.
This turns out to be part of an apparent trend.
For while Google and Facebook have recently taken steps to remove dangerous anti- vax content from their platforms, changing algorithms so that users searching for information about vaccines are directed away from fake news sites spreading false conspiracy theories, Amazon seems to be doing the opposite.
To appreciate this, just look for material about ‘vaccination’ on the retailer’s website.
Searches by the Mail this week returned details of dozens of books and films promoting anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, and not one that offered a mainstream take on the subject.
Such books, which are generally pitched at parents seeking to educate themselves about this vital public health issue, come in a variety of guises.
Some are overtly hostile to immunisation and have such titles as Vaccine-Nation: Poisoning The Population, One Shot At A Time’, or Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying, or Vaccine Illusion: How Vaccination Compromises Our Natural Immunity.
Many are written by homeopaths, whose multibillion-pound industry has a financial stake in undermining mainstream medical science.
Other titles are more sinister. Indeed, some of the most popular books available on Amazon to people searching for reliable information about vaccination could easily be mistaken for bona fide medical texts.
They include Miller’s Review Of Critical Vaccine Studies, which purports to summarise ‘ 400
important scientific papers’. In fact, its contents tell readers that vaccines can cause ‘ cancers, allergies, seizures, bleeding disorders and type 1 diabetes’, along with ‘neurological, immunological and developmental harm’.
For public health organisations that must cope with the fallout, Amazon’s promotion of such dubious texts is deeply worrying.
‘ People profiting from peddling parents dangerous myths about lifesaving vaccines risk the safety of children, their families and our whole society,’ says Professor Stephen Powis, medical director of the NHS.
‘ Getting protected against killer conditions like measles and mumps can mean the difference between life and death, and responsible businesses — particularly online, where misinformation can spread unchecked — must take a zero-tolerance approach to publishing and promoting materials which are likely to do harm.’
Others explicitly accuse Amazon of ‘promoting harm’.
‘Over the past few months, some tech giants have made positive moves to increase the visibility of evidence-based information on vaccines, which is to be commended. We now need other highprofile companies, particularly those with a wide reach, to follow suit,’ says Dr Doug Brown, chief executive of the British Society for Immunology.
The Royal Society of Public Health adds: ‘As one of the largest distributors of information in the world, Amazon has a social responsibility to ensure the content they push is not promoting harm. In the specific case of this book, if High Street retailers were printing and selling harmful material such as this, they would be rightly castigated. On top, Amazon needs to have a serious review of how products are prioritised on its platform.’ THE MPs who spoke to the Mail were similarly concerned — they included Dr Philippa Whitford, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Vaccination, which is launching an inquiry into ‘ vaccine hesitancy’ next year.
‘Any company with the reach and influence of Amazon should always be responsible,’ she said, ‘and the fact that it’s not just selling this book but also printing it puts it beyond the line of being a mere retailer. They should urgently rethink their policies and start considering the harm they are contributing to.’
Should it face political sanctions, the internet giant can’t say that it hasn’t been warned.
Earlier this year, leading u. S. politicians wrote a public letter to the company’s boss Jeff Bezos, urging him to prevent anti-vaccination content being promoted to customers in the u.S. The letter asked Amazon to ‘ act responsibly and ensure it does not contribute to this growing public health catastrophe’.
Seemingly chastened, Bezos — the world’s richest and arguably most influential man — agreed to remove five films promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories from its Prime Video platform. They included Vaxxed, a documentary written and directed by Andrew Wakefield. Little else seems to have been done to clean up Amazon’s act, however — and, until this week, DVDs of Vaxxed were being offered to consumers searching for information on vaccination.
Asked to explain why it was printing books including Sarah Doesn’t Want To Be Vaccinated, or to respond to criticisms such as those in this article, an Amazon spokesman said merely that all books it sells adhere to ‘content guidelines’.
‘Our guidelines address content that is illegal or infringing or that we otherwise prohibit, such as pornography. We are similar to other stores that sell books or video content. We provide customers with a variety of viewpoints.’
To public health authorities and other critics of misguided ideologues such as Helen Kimball-Brooke, that really isn’t good enough.
For when you spread misinformation about vaccination and print books that seek to brainwash young readers, your relentless search for profit puts young people’s lives at risk.