As many regular readers will know I’m pro-vaccination. Being a mid life parent I’m old enough to remember my grandparents and their generation speaking about some of the horrific diseases that once circulated around, such as whooping cough or tuberculosis or polio or diphtheria. These horrific and life limiting and life threatening diseases are now almost unknown at least in Britain because vaccination has removed them from being a concern or worry for parents.
Because of vaccination I don’t have to worry about my child contracting Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Rotavirus, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Tetanus or Polio, amongst other horrible diseases. I’m also old enough to recall going on holiday as a young child and seeing older children in leg irons because they were crippled with Polio, another disease that has been absent in the UK since the mid 1980’s because of vaccination. These children were extremely unlucky to have contracted Polio prior to Britain really getting going with its comprehensive infant vaccination programme. They slipped through the net and ended up crippled. My child is very lucky to have been born in the country he was born in and the time he was born in and that is because he was able to have all the vaccinations necessary to avoid horrible and dangerous diseases. It gave me profound pleasure to realise at the time of his first vaccinations that he did not have to be vaccinated for smallpox as this horrible disease that killed 30% of those who contracted it, is now extinct in the wild and has been made so because of vaccinations.
Regular readers will also be aware of how I’ve criticised the nations that are steeped in Islamic mumbo jumbo like Pakistan, Sudan and parts of Nigeria that this mumbo jumbo is feeding into vaccine hesitancy in those nations and regions and is a stumbling block to finally eradicating Polio in a similar fashion to how Smallpox has been eradicated. Belief in bullshit in these places about vaccines, such as they are a ‘Jewish plot to sterilise Muslims’ or a plot by the West to weaken Muslims in some way contributes a great deal to vaccine hesitancy.
I have no problem at all with calling out anti vaccine bullshit and misinformation in the more benighted parts of the world as it is something that needs to be said. Vaccine hesitancy in these areas is contributing to higher infant mortality and suffering via disease. However, I would be quite rightly accused of hypocrisy if I did not aim the same vehemence at anti vaccine lunatics in the West as I aim at Islamic cultural backwaters and their culture of vaccine refusal.
The anti vaccination cult has been with us for a while now. It first came to prominence in the mid 1970’s when there was a problem with a vaccine in the USA for Swine Flu. What happened was the American government panicked and against WHO advice, started a mass vaccination campaign against this particular flu. It should be remembered that at that time there was a great worry that that year’s flu strain would be like that which wrought havoc on the world in 1918/1919.
Unfortunately standards were not as vigorous and knowledge not as great then as they are now and because of some issue with that particular vaccine, an issue that even now is unknown, a small number of people,450, got Guilian Barre Syndrome after vaccination. This caused a rise in vaccine hesitancy among Americans following this incident.
The anti vaccination cult got a further boost in the late 1990’s from a British charlatan called Andrew Wakefield who falsely claimed that the Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine caused autism. It did not and this claim has been thoroughly debunked loads of times but it not only increased the numbers of fools who refused to vaccinate their children, but also caused an increase in deaths and disablements of children from diseases that would have been prevented had the parents listened to medical advice rather than the ravings of anti vaccination quacks.
The Covid19 pandemic has been an absolute boon to the anti vaccination cultists. There’s been a whole plethora of anti vax bullshit going around on social media and on anti vax websites and the channels of conspiraloons like David Icke. There’s been the obvious falsehoods, such as that 5G telecommunications creates viruses, something that is physically and chemically impossible, not just because it’s impossible for a radio wave to create a virus, but also because the millimetric waves of 5G are not the sort of ionising radiation (which is found way way above the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum) that has any significant biological effect. Non-ionising radio waves do not change or damage DNA in the manner that X rays and Gamma and Cosmic rays can.
However, the anti vaccination cultists have been using more subtle lies that are more difficult for the unwary or scientifically illiterate to easily debunk in the same way that the ‘5G causes Covid’ ones are to debunk. It is one of these types of lies that I want to deal with in some detail in this piece.
A couple of days ago well known anti Covid vaccination advocate who has also been involved in other more positive stuff in the past, such as speaking up for gays living under the Islamic State terror group, David Vance, put out a screenshot on social media. This screenshot was from a publication that was not at the time named but was an article about how ‘covid vaccines’ caused death in ferrets in a lab test. The article was by two very high profile anti vaxxers Robert Kennedy Jr and James Lyon-Weiler. The screenshot in question is reproduced below:
RFK Jr is a scion of the famous Kennedy political family from the United States who has promoted the anti vaccination cause for a number of years. James Lyon-Weiler was once a respectable scientist working in computational molecular biology, but has decided to throw his lot in with the anti vax cultists. This is what Respectful Insolence a Quackbusting site said of James Lyon-Weiler:
James Lyons-Weiler was actually a legitimate scientist before he turned to anti-vaccine pseudoscience, having trained in computational molecular biology and served as the director of the Bioinformatics Analysis Core at the University of Pittsburgh for several years until around five years ago, when, for whatever reason, he left and founded the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), which took to carrying out and funding pseudoscientific antivaccine projects. Basically, he’s gone full antivax.
I contacted Mr Vance on Gab to ask him to disclose the source of the screenshot above as I had my suspicions that it came from somewhere lacking in scientific credibility such as Natural News. The original screenshot did not carry with it the name of the publication that it came from, something that further aroused my suspicions. Because I suspected that this was article was scaremongering as well as being inaccurate scientifically, I asked Mr Vance the following question:
Source please. It’s not ‘Natural News ‘ is it? I can’t quite see the name of the publication that this is coming from. I’d like to know the name of the publication in order to make a judgement on its credibility.
Despite a reminder to Mr Vance after a couple of hours, I did not get an answer from him as to the nature of the publication that this came from. Therefore I did a bit more digging of my own. I eventually, by using the names of the authors of the article combined with the article’s title, tracked down the publication that this piece was published in. It turns out that it was published by an extreme Roman Catholic pro-life web magazine called Lifesite News. Now I’ve nothing against the pro-life position or those who hold these views. I’m slightly more pro-life than I used to be but still believe that abortion should be safe and legal but even better it should be rare. Abortion in my view should not be commonplace but only used in those rare occasions when it is unavoidable. However, Lifesite News takes the pro-life view to the extreme. Not only are they anti abortion but they are also against the sort of stem cell research that could save many lives and against assisted conception, which is something that has helped thousands upon thousands of childless couples conceive a much wanted child.
Finding the source of this screenshot also allowed me to access the links on the article on the Lifesite News page, something I could not do from the original screenshot. What I found was not only was the article itself being dishonest in its claim that the adverse reactions were connected with current covid vaccinations, the PubMed link that they inserted showed that the adverse reactions in animal studies with ferrets were not using current mRNA vaccines but inactivated whole virus vaccines. The ferret studies which were in addition from 2012 and were for SARS cov1, a different virus from Covid19. The PubMed link that I accessed from the Lifesite News site can be found here. PubMed is a reliable source of scientific and medical data and published papers but it’s plain to see that Lifesite News is abusing the information and putting a dishonest spin on it.
Not to put too fine a point on it the antivaxxers have lied by claiming that these 2012 studies with a completely different vaccine method were something to do with current covid19 vaccines. This is a big lie but also a subtle one as most readers would probably not have bothered to click on the PubMed links and if they did would probably not have bothered to examine the text that closely. They would unfortunately have relied on the assessments of the antivaxxers RFK Jr and Lyon-Weiler. When I found out that Mr Vance’s screenshot was taken from an extremely partisan site and was a tissue of misinformation and lies, I contacted Mr Vance with my findings. This is what I said to Mr Vance on Gab:
I’ve tracked down your ‘source’ Mr Vance and it’s an extremely partisan Roman Catholic anti abortion site which seems to have morphed into an anti vax site of very dubious provenance. This site is almost as bad as that wretched hive of loons and quacks that is Natural News. Besides that the linked pubmed studies are related to whole inactivated virus vaccinations and the studies were from 2012. This is nothing to do with mRNA based vaccines. You’ve been great in the past on such issues as the killing of gays in Islamic lands and have spoken out about this when others feared to. But you’ve turned into a rabid anti vaxxer willing to push any old anti vaccine tin foil hattery, it’s a great shame to see you go down this route.
I still think that it is a great shame to see Mr Vance going down the same path of pseudo-scientific lunacy as have the anti vaxxers. Mr Vance has pointed out and condemned the homophobia in orthodox Islam and has in the past asked awkward, pungent but necessary questions about fatherlessness in Britain’s Black communities and the contribution it makes to poverty and deprivation. He was right to bring these difficult issues up but he’s completely wrong with his anti vaccination stance.
I can understand why some have been reluctant to accept that a vaccine against covid is probably the best way out of this mess. If you are not familiar with reading scientific papers or examining data or even doing the sort of basic journalistic research that I’ve done on this story, it’s easy to get sucked into the scaremongering put out by those who are not just opposed to the relatively new but long studied and researched technology of the mRNA covid vaccines, but to vaccines in general.
I was nervous about the mRNA vaccine but it was only after I did some digging into it and its history that I was forced to come to the conclusion that it wasn’t as ‘untested’ as the anti vax cultists had claimed. The theory of mRNA vaccines goes right back to the early to mid 1970’s but it was only until the turn of the century that the scientific techniques had advanced enough to make these vaccines a possibility. The SARS outbreak in the early part of the century spurred on research into mRNA vaccines as the use of whole inactivated viruses of the SARS and MERS type did not seem to be that effective. The problem was getting the active part of the messenger RNA into the human body’s cells to do its good work before the body’s immune system killed it off and rendered the vaccine ineffective. That problem has now been solved and due to previous research on SARS and MERS and the massive amounts of money that has been thrown at the problem, we now have a vaccine against Covid19. Not just that but the new techniques for the covid19 vaccine may also be utilised for other horrible diseases, maybe even a better vaccine for Ebola or other haemorrhagic fevers? It’s quite possible that at some time in the future what we’ve learned from studying Covid19, SARS and MERS and developing a vaccine for at least one of them, might even be used to tackle one of humanities biggest medical horror stories, the unicellular plasmodium parasite that causes Malaria?
I tend to agree with Mr Vance that the government has not done well with regards covid19. They’ve done so badly that I can’t see myself voting Tory next time and I’m not voting Labour either, I’d rather eat my own faeces than do that. The lockdowns have caused their own death toll, which might even turn out to be greater than covid itself has caused and it may take a decade or more to repair the damage both social and economic that they have created.
The government has indeed done shortsighted and unscientific things such as restricting post mortems for those who die of covid, something that wasn’t even done at the start of the AIDS pandemic. By restricting postmortems for covid deaths it’s quite possible that valuable information about this disease and its effects has been lost. The government failed to remember that a great deal was learned about AIDS from the results of postmortems of those who died from it. The sclerotic NHS has also performed badly when compared to other more flexible healthcare systems and which are less hidebound by bureaucracy than the NHS is. Mr Vance is also correct to decry the appalling way that people’s liberties have been trashed during the covid pandemic. However his descent into anti vaccination nutbaggery is completely wrong and I’m disappointed in him for uncritically promoting the utter and complete bollocks put out by Lifesite News and by RFK Jr and James Lyon-Weiler. It would not have taken much effort on his part to check the links on Lifesite News to see that the Pubmed articles were not talking about SARS COV2 but SARS COV1 and that the papers that were cited by Lifesite News were from 2012, nearly a decade prior to the SARS COV2 pandemic.
If there are lessons to be learned from this case then the first will be that you should always check your sources especially when sources are making scientific claims. The second lesson that needs to be learned is that anti vax sources, such as Lifesite News and other ‘alternative medicine’ outlets like Natural News, do not have any scruples about lying or misrepresenting what scientific papers and publications say. For these type of publications the ideology whether it be anti vaccination or other lunacies such as a belief in quack cancer cures, always seems to take precedence over the truth.
I hope and indeed pray that Mr Vance will learn these lessons and be a bit more careful in future when he cites sources as some, like Lifesite News, are more than a little lacking in credibility or accuracy or even honesty come to that. We’ve all, me included, occasionally been caught out by the promoters of bollocks and bullshit and by plausible charlatans and there are a lot of these in the anti vaxer movement. However as some of them, such as those anti vaxxers promoted in the above mentioned piece from Lifesite News are more subtle in their lies than others, we need to be extra careful that we don’t end up falling for their dishonest claims and misinformation about science. Mr Vance is more than entitled to express his views as that is what freedom of speech is or rather should be about. But by speaking freely he should also expect some degree of criticism from those who disagree with his views either in whole or in part.
I may be judged by some to be a fool for not giving my daughter the MMR vaccine, but I think you are forgetting that a parent knows best.
My son suffered greatly after having all his ‘jabs’ as an infant and from what I saw he wasn’t the only one. There was an abundant amount of children suffering the same conditions such as autistic tendencies, bowel problems, food allergies etc all of which Dr Andrew Wakefield reported.
As I said in a previous post these symptoms may or may not have originated from the MMR, but if not there should have been an investigation into where they did come from. Instead of listening to the public and trying to find the original source there was a full scale investigation into discrediting Wakefield’s findings. Maybe the investigation into Wakefield was justified but it was hardly reassuring for the parents of the children showing symptoms that Wakefield pointed out.
I remember back in the late 90s/2000s parents were seriously concerned over the amount of vaccines their infants were having. It is right to realise that young children’s immune systems are still developing. I recall parents requesting to the government that children should have the MMR in separate doses but this was rejected.
One has to ask what is more important, parental reassurance and confidence in the government or the money that it would have cost to distribute the MMR vaccine separately?
People also still remember the worldwide effects of Thalidomide.
I feel one of the reasons people do not trust is not because of the science but it is more to do with not trusting the government. You can look back to Tony Blair’s government and although I think he is a nice person all the spin he used during his time was a let down. Having an aquarius moon usually means one is a showman, someone with knowledge yet not adverse to bending the truth (including with those he worked for and represented) and these people usually do this to save face.
You only have to look at the unpopular war in Iraq.
Again, Boris Johnson is a nice man yet his lack of clarity and forthrightness make people distrust him.
What is needed to convince people is someone who avoids spin and has an honest and direct manner who has nothing to gain with their convictions.
Maybe someone like Margaret Thatcher.
It’s time Keir Starmer started standing up and being heard. Now is a good a time as any.
That’s what I think.
OK I’ll try to deal with this line by line if I may.
“I may be judged by some to be a fool for not giving my daughter the MMR vaccine, but I think you are forgetting that a parent knows best.”
Every parent has to decide for themselves what is best for their children. Sometimes a parent does know best but what about those situations where the parent does not? What about for example the parent who believes in ‘woo’ such as homeopathy and who has a child with cancer but refuses proven chemotherapy for homeopathic ‘treatment’ with the result that the child dies of cancer?
“My son suffered greatly after having all his ‘jabs’ as an infant and from what I saw he wasn’t the only one. There was an abundant amount of children suffering the same conditions such as autistic tendencies, bowel problems, food allergies etc all of which Dr Andrew Wakefield reported.”
Correlation may sometimes be causation but it is often not the case. There is a correlation and causation link between a heavy wind and a tree falling as that is very obvious and measurable. However in the Wakefield studies case correlation was not causation. Wakefield was not only a bad doctor and scientist but he’s also a charlatan and a fraud. This article from Science Based Medicine shows just how bad and shoddy Wakefield is. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/antivaccine-hero-andrew-wakefield-scientific-fraud/ He manipulated data for the dates when autistic symptoms became apparent and also allegedly falsifying the medical records of a small number of children studied in the Wakefield paper. The problem is that autistic symptoms start to become apparent to parents at roughly the same time as infant innoculations are given but that doesn’t mean that this correlation means that the causation is the vaccine.
“As I said in a previous post these symptoms may or may not have originated from the MMR, but if not there should have been an investigation into where they did come from. ”
There is no link with MMR and autism. Wakefield’s results have not been able to be replicated. There is ongoing research into autism and it is still a medical mystery with possibly some environmental causes and some genetic.
“Instead of listening to the public and trying to find the original source there was a full scale investigation into discrediting Wakefield’s findings. Maybe the investigation into Wakefield was justified but it was hardly reassuring for the parents of the children showing symptoms that Wakefield pointed out.”
Wakefield’s allegations were thoroughly investigated not just in the UK but worldwide. The investigation was not formed to ‘discredit’ Wakefield, but to investigate his claims. The investigation turned up not just shoddy science and unethical behaviour but also conflicts of interest on Wakefield’s part.
“I remember back in the late 90s/2000s parents were seriously concerned over the amount of vaccines their infants were having. It is right to realise that young children’s immune systems are still developing. I recall parents requesting to the government that children should have the MMR in separate doses but this was rejected. ”
At this point in timeline, the late 90’s the press was full of Wakefield’s fraudulent ‘study’. It was only a few years later that Wakefeid was revealed to be a fraud. I’ve heard this claim that kids have ‘too many vaccines’ and it primarily comes from anti vaxxers. I’ve dug into this subject and can find no reputable evidence that combination vaccines are any worse or better than single vaccines.
“One has to ask what is more important, parental reassurance and confidence in the government or the money that it would have cost to distribute the MMR vaccine separately? ”
I’m no fan of Blair, although I voted for him in 97 on the grounds that we had a sleaze riddled Tory government that needed removing. I later became a critic of Blair and his policies and can see now the immense damage that they’ve done to this country. To bow to pressure from uninformed parents, many of whom had bought into the guff promoted by anti vaxxers and Wakefield would have given Wakefield’s fraud a credibility that it did not deserve. I believe that history has on this occasion shown the Blair government to have been correct not to bow to pressure from parents whipped up into a hysteria by anti vaxxers. Why bother giving reassurance when reassurance has plainly and scientifically been shown to be not necessary?
Of course the Thalidomide incident was a scandal as were the Nazi medical experiments and the Tuskagee Syphlis study. Scientists are sometimes wrong ‘uns but that doesn’t mean that all science is wrong. I do agree with you however that the start of the current mistrust of government does date from the Blair years.
I used to be a fan of Boris Johnson but over time I’ve come to see him as weak and vacillating and not that straight with the public when he needs to be. Also his personal life does call into question his character. A politician who not only cheats on his wives but fathers a plethora of children by other women may well be the sort of politician that will cheat on his country and his people?
I agree that we need to see more spin free politicians but I’m beginning to doubt whether we will see such politicians emerge from one of the Big Three parties. Even Thatcher engaged in spin although it was not called that back then.
Keir Starmer is untrustworthy. I don’t think that he has got it in him to rein in the Left like Kinnock did. He’s more likely to hide the far Left and turn to PR to make his party look better. Starmer is about as slippery as an eel smothered in vaseline.
I think that it may be unfair to lump those who have reservations about the new Covid vaccines with anti vaxers generally. These vaccinations have been developed very quickly and I think that it is a fair point to say that there is no way of knowing if there are any long term effects. I have tried to read up on the subject and tried to make sure that I made an informed decision on the matter. I have just had my first jab a few days ago. I haven’t had any Ill effects from it so far.
They have been developed very quickly but that is only because there was pre-existing mRNA research that had been done into other coronaviruses and other conditions. As I said in my piece about why I changed my mind about them I was unaware just how long the idea of mRNA vaccines had been theorised and how much work had been done in this area since the SARS Cov1 outbreak at the turn of the century. I can really understand why people have been hesitant because this is a really advanced and cutting edge area of molecular biology. Working on mRNA coronavirus vaccines is at the edge of what’s possible and is something that has only become possible in the last five years or so. To give an analogy, to compare mRNA vaccines with common or garden genetic modification of bacteria or plants, is like comparing the latest Rolls Royce jet engine with a 1950’s Ford Popular engine. They might work in similar ways by burning fuel, but beyond that there are massive differences.
There was bound to be a natural hesitancy from the scientifically uninformed, which to be frank is most people, but this hesitancy has been stoked up and worsened by the anti vax crowd. I’m getting reports of people feeling lousy for a day or so after the vaccination but nothign worse than that. I’ve heard nothing like the sort of scare stories of people dropping dead straight after the vaccine which are being pushed by the anti vax crowd. As for long term effects the monitoring of this will be ongoing via the Yellow Card system.
As for Mr Vance. Not only has he refused point blank to show me his source (which as you know turned out to be a fraggle fest called Lifesite News) but he is also studiously ignoring me when I question his line, something that to me looks very suspicious. When he does interact with pro-vaccination types he’s screaming at them that they are ‘trolls’.
I must admit that I’m absolutely astonished at the rate that reported deaths from covid are going down since vaccination started back in late December. I still believe that the lockdowns and the mask mandates have done significant psychological damage the scale of which we do not know yet and although I still would not grass up a non mask wearer as there’s no way of knowing whether that person has a genuine medical exemption or not and have seen that the police have behaved appallingly and with obvious and palpable bias, I also believe that the vaccines will get us out of this. I think that the UK government made major mistakes, such as only considering influenza as a pandemic threat and not other respiratory diseases and has not been altogether straight with the public but hopefully much has been learned for when we face a future pandemic. This is because a future pandemic is likely to emerge,either from the far East where these respiratory diseases seem to spring from on a regular basis or some other disease that may come from Africa where tropical forests are infiltrated by people either hunting animals or clearing forests for farming. Increased human contact with wildlife in some areas does provide an opportunity for viruses to jump species and this is something that will need to be monitored in the future.
I agree with you that some parents do not know best if it is a case that they refuse proven treatment for life saving illness yet these life saving treatments still have side effects which are usually accepted. The difference is that parents who have life saving treatment for their children are fully informed. ALL medications carry side effects.
Wakefield may, as you say, have been a fraud yet he did his homework on recognising the symptoms of the children that were suffering at the time.
There may have been an investigation into Wakefield’s claims but there was no admission regarding the symptoms many children were suffering from or what caused these symptoms.
I disagree that ‘the Blair government to have been correct not to bow to pressure from parents whipped up into a hysteria by anti vaxxers’
Parents only wanted answers to their children’s symptoms and I feel you are blaming parents for attempting to find an answer to their children’s symptoms.
‘Why bother giving reassurance when reassurance has plainly and scientifically been shown to be not necessary ‘ . Reassurance was required because these symptoms were not figments of people’s imaginations. I find your reasoning very flippant.
Parents always have and always will need reassurance. That is what should have been a priority. Any doctor investigated regarding being a fraud should have taken second place. I personally feel this was not done.
If you want people to trust government advice, putting people who don’t bullsh1t the public should be a priority. Governments need to listen to all people. They will only achieve this by talking to the people on the street and making good decisions that way. Not taking a high handed manner or the ‘do as I say not as I do’ attitude.
“I agree with you that some parents do not know best if it is a case that they refuse proven treatment for life saving illness yet these life saving treatments still have side effects which are usually accepted. The difference is that parents who have life saving treatment for their children are fully informed. ALL medications carry side effects.”
All medications can have side effects,even asprin.
“Wakefield may, as you say, have been a fraud yet he did his homework on recognising the symptoms of the children that were suffering at the time.”
He didn’t even do his homework properly. He manipulated data and had shoddy lab practises. He not only promulgated a wrong idea and an idea that has now been categorically demonstrated to be wrong,but he probably contributed to the deaths of children from preventable diseases because of his scaremongering over vaccines.
“There may have been an investigation into Wakefield’s claims but there was no admission regarding the symptoms many children were suffering from or what caused these symptoms.”
Wakefield’s data was looked into time and time again and found to be wrong. As I said earlier research into Autism is ongoing it’s one of those great medical mysteries. However what we do know about these symptoms is that they were nothing to do with vaccines.
I disagree that ‘the Blair government to have been correct not to bow to pressure from parents whipped up into a hysteria by anti vaxxers’
Parents only wanted answers to their children’s symptoms and I feel you are blaming parents for attempting to find an answer to their children’s symptoms.
No I’m blaming the anti vax lunatics who promulgated the false idea that vaccines cause autism and that the combined jab was somehow more dangerous than singular innoculations. The parents were influenced by the anti vax lunatics so I don’t blame the parents. If the government of the time had said ‘OK, we’ll give parents an option between a combined vaccine and a series of single dose vaccines’, what do you think that would have looked like? I will tell you. It would have looked like an admission that there was something wrong with the triple vaccine when there was not. It would have fed the anti vax loons.
‘Why bother giving reassurance when reassurance has plainly and scientifically been shown to be not necessary ‘ . Reassurance was required because these symptoms were not figments of people’s imaginations. I find your reasoning very flippant.
I’ve looked back and the government in 2014 did reassure people about the MMR https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mmr-vaccine-dispelling-myths/measles-mumps-rubella-mmr-maintaining-uptake-of-vaccine and here from 2002 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC100893/ I recall this Wakefield scandal and the press were pushing Blair whose wife had just had a new baby, to clarify whether he was going to have MMR or single vaccines. Blair should have put his privacy on the back burner on this one and said Yes his child had had MMR vaccine much earlier than he did. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1797038.stm This was a bit of a PR fail on Blair’s part. It’s not being flippant as I know that MMR is safe and that Wakefield is a charlatan.
“Parents always have and always will need reassurance. That is what should have been a priority. Any doctor investigated regarding being a fraud should have taken second place. I personally feel this was not done.”
I agree that Blair should have done more to reassure such as by publicly stating that his baby had had MMR vaccine.
“If you want people to trust government advice, putting people who don’t bullsh1t the public should be a priority. ”
Agree there
“Governments need to listen to all people. They will only achieve this by talking to the people on the street and making good decisions that way. ”
Agree there but should we listen to lunatics who tell lies about vaccines such as Del Bigtree for example?
“Not taking a high handed manner or the ‘do as I say not as I do’ attitude.”
That was Blair’s error with regard MMR where he unwisely and destructively tried to claim privacy and also the double standard error of Piers Morgan telling the rest of us to lock down whilst having luxury holidays.