When I was growing up in the 1950s British midlands, a common sight was children wearing leg callipers. They were recovering from Polio.
Everyone knew someone who’d had polio. My grandmother had had it as a child, and her height never exceeded 4 ft 5 inches. My junior school teacher had it as an adult, and he was stooped and walked with the aid of crutches. It often caused temporary or even permanent paralysis, and many were hospitalised with respiratory problems. This is the polio ward of a typical hospital…
The machines were commonly called ‘iron lungs’, and they kept people alive by doing the breathing for them, because the muscles that normally operated the diaphragm had stopped working. People were seriously ill with the illness; most went on to make some sort of recovery, but thousands didn’t.
Polio is highly contagious, but following the introduction of the polio vaccine in the 1950s, the disease was effectively eradicated.
Likewise, routine vaccinations were introduced for dangerous and contagious illnesses such as Diphtheria as well as the ‘childhood’ illnesses such as Measles, Rubella, Mumps and Chickenpox, and by the 1970s, they had all but disappeared.
I also remember outbreaks of Smallpox and Tuberculosis that were successfully controlled by vaccination campaigns.
Cue a UK doctor called Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, he managed to get a study published in the prestigious UK journal, The Lancet, which claimed a correlation between the MMR vaccine, and autism. The scientific work done was later found to be ‘seriously flawed’ and based on false data, and the co-authors, as well as the journal retracted the article.
Wakefield was discredited as a scientist, and ‘struck off the books’ as a doctor. Sadly, it didn’t stop him from getting very rich writing books and making films aimed at a gullible sector of the public who prefer conspiracy theories to actual science. He also sells diagnostic kits for a non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered.
Since then, there have been many studies in many countries, trying to restore public confidence in vaccines, all of which have shown no correlation between vaccines and autism. But belief in Wakefield’s discredited work persists, and he almost single-handedly triggered the current anti-vaxxer movement which has resulted in thousands (millions?) of unnecessary deaths during Covid.
Even worse, people are now dying from diseases such as Polio, Measles, German Measles and Mumps that were at one time considered to be almost eradicated.
Before the arrival of the internet, the opinions of Anti-vaxxers would have gone pretty well unnoticed. But social media has been a boon to them. I keep reading things like…
“Show me any studies that prove that the heavy metal preservatives in vaccines – mercury and aluminium – have been proven safe for infants, children or adults? There are none, those studies have never been done.”
When elements are combined in chemical compounds, they rarely have any similarities with their elemental form. So the post is the equivalent of suggesting that water is dangerous because it contains oxygen and hydrogen, which in their gaseous states form an explosive mixture. Or common table salt (Sodium Chloride) should be avoided because metallic sodium explodes on contact with water, and chlorine is highly toxic.
If you’re as scientifically naïve as the ones who post this sort of thing, and you prefer the opinions of conspiracists rather than scientists, then I imagine these posts can seem plausible and reinforce your anti-vaxx views. But remember, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
People are dying because of anti-vaxx opinion. I’m not particularly religious, but I hope there’s a special place in Hell for Andrew Wakefield.
