Why we must protect all our children with a jab

OMG! What I’ve dreaded since the late 1990s has come to pass. Measles cases are soaring.

Parents lost faith in the MMR jab after the now-discredited Andrew Wakefield claimed autism is associated with the MMR jab.

IT ISN’T. I don’t know what to say to convince doubting parents to vaccinate their children. I’ve written about this issue countless times in the past 20 years, attempting to reassure them and to get them to protect their children with the jab.

What we’ve all forgotten is that measles is a really nasty condition. The aftermath can include damage to a child’s hearing, to their lungs, to their eyes. Surely no parent would risk that. We are living in a kind of cloud cuckoo-land where we think an epidemic will never strike.

Now we know it will if we do not take up MMR vaccinations. Parents should know that it is our only protection. We don’t have any other.

Furthermore, each and every parent has to contribute, not only to the protection of their own child but to that of every other child, by keeping our “herd immunity” intact.

This only happens when 95% of children are vaccinated.

We already have an unprotected community of teenagers whose parents failed to vaccinate them in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Please don’t create another community of unprotected children in 2018.