Are you an anti-vaccer? Please tell me you’re not

I was chatting to a neighbour the other day about Trump, and she came up with something I actually agree with him about, namely the power of ‘Big Pharma’ and its egregious policy of pushing opioids on American doctors, who have created thousands of addicts in the process. But then she went a step too far. She also agreed with him in his distrust of immunisation generally, admitting she had not had her children immunised against anything.

I took exception to this, as you might imagine. After all, I have been immunising people, especially children, throughout my 40 year medical career, and see it as perhaps the most useful single activity I ever undertook. I pointed out to her that what she getting was “immunisation for free”: that her children were being protected by all the other children in the community who had been immunised; therefore she should acknowledge a debt of gratitude to all the parents who had taken a tiny risk in having their kids immunised, whereas she had not. I’m not sure she got what I was saying.

There was a piece in last week’s Guardian which looked at the growth of these ‘anti-vaccers’ as they are known, not only in the US (remember, Trump actually invited Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor who was struck off for his unethical research programmes, to his inaugural ball), but in Britain, Europe and around the world. As libertarians from the left and populists from the right come together to foist on a gullible public the lie that immunisation is some sort of evil government conspiracy, politicians who support this pernicious view are winning elections and thereby in a position to effect anti vaccination laws. What do these people really want? Do they want to go back 200 years, to a point where nobody was vaccinated against anything? Don’t they realise the terrible genie that would let out of the bottle? Within a generation a whole set of hideous diseases, currently on the verge of extinction, would make a dramatic comeback. Smallpox, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, all manner of meningitis types - the list is long and lethal. Yet all that would come to pass in just a few decades if we stopped immunising children and adults.

This is all part of the ‘anti-science’ movement which is becoming so powerful these days- headed up by that arch anti-scientist, Trump himself. The same sort of thinking will tell you climate change is a con. That billions are being wasted on pure science research. I could go on. But I’m getting too depressed. Happy New Year peeps!