Vaccinations

Click, click, click. That is all it takes to fall down the rabbit hole of the anti-vaccine movement that has taken root on social media.

Just a few taps on Instagram, for example, and one is taken far from the world of avocado brunches and deep into the realm of ‘anti-vax’ conspiracies, ranging from pseudo-scientific vindications for the disgraced British scientist Andrew Wakefield’s bogus links between the MMR jab and autism in children, to hashtags such as #vaccineskill (with some 18,236 posts), to mocked up images of youngsters punctured by a barrage of needles.

This is viral content in the most literal sense. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has pinpointed “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the 10 biggest global health threats for 2019.

Earlier this month, the head of the NHS, Simon Stevens blamed “fake news” by so-called anti-vaxxers on social media for fuelling a tripling in measles cases. with 913 infections recorded in England between January and October last year, compared with 259 in the whole of 2017.

Similarly, the number of measles infections across Europe tripled to 82,500 in 2018, compared to the previous year - a surge which killed 72 children and adults. And as of midnight last night, Rockland County in New York state took the “extremely unusual” step of banning non-vaccinated children from public places for 30 days, in a bid to halt an outbreak of measles – a disease declared eradicated from the US in 2000 – which has infected at least 153 people in the area since October.

Across the world, the anti-vaccine movement is drawing together disparate supporters from US President, Donald Trump – who prior to election scattergunned numerous anti-vaccine tweets – to Russian trolls, from Hollywood celebrities to hipster parents in the Home Counties and Orthodox Jews in London.

And the scare tactics appear to be registering: across Britain, the most recent NHS data shows the proportion of two year-olds immunised against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) fell for the fourth year in a row in 2017-18 to 91.2 per cent (the WHO target is 95 per cent).

Dr Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project established 10 years ago at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, calls it societal “hubris”, whereby as infectious diseases are brought under control, attention turns to the risk of the vaccine itself, even if it is minimal in comparison.

In recent years, she says, the sheer scale of the anti-vaccine messages online have become far harder for health professionals to contest.

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