Vaccinations were first trialled in 1796 by Edward Jenner, a rural country doctor in Berkeley, in my constituency. He published the results of his work in 1798. Since their introduction, it is estimated that vaccines have saved more than 500 million lives, and they remain the single most effective health intervention ever.
The story of their discovery and roll out is interesting because there are many similarities to today’s attitudes and doubts about vaccination.
Initially Jenner discovered that by infecting someone with cowpox, a mild and self-limiting illness, this then gave them immunity to smallpox, which remained a major killer in the late 18th century, killing up to a third of those who contracted the disease. Those who survived were commonly deeply scarred. The story goes that local people noticed that milkmaids always had fair and unblemished complexions, and no one knew why.
The use of cowpox inoculation, a disease caught from cows, was so effective that the practice quickly spread – even though the understanding of immunology at that point in time was not fully able to account for the vaccine’s success. This ‘gap’ allowed those who did not understand the science and were suspicious of the evidence to spread misinformation and rumour. They saw it as their moral duty to oppose a process that effectively involved injecting a fluid that came from a diseased animal into a healthy human, and invoked a range of spurious arguments to back up their fears (including spreading rumours that cowpox vaccination made the patient grow horns). Unsurprisingly, the loudest critics were those with the most to lose – Benjamin Moseley and William Rowley were financially invested in promoting variolation (a primitive form of inoculation that actually infected patients with smallpox bacteria).
However, the fact that vaccination was overwhelmingly successful, reducing fatality to 1-2%, meant that Jenner’s supporters felt a moral duty to champion the new procedure.
Today we have numerous vaccinations against a variety of nasty infectious diseases which we simply don’t see anymore (diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella, meningitis and now, through government action, the roll out of the chickenpox vaccine). As a doctor, I simply don’t see these diseases anymore. Smallpox itself was declared officially eradicated by the World Health Organisation in 1980 – exclusively through the thorough use of vaccines.
Yet major public doubts have resurfaced about the safety of vaccines. This really began when Andrew Wakefield, a doctor in England, wrote a research paper claiming that the MMR vaccine gave rise to childhood autism. The paper itself was proven to be fraudulent and Wakefield had a personal financial interest in promoting single vaccines. It was established through multiple trials that there was absolutely no link between the vaccine and harm, and Wakefield was struck off as a doctor.
Yet, last year, in my GP surgery, I saw my first ever case of measles, and indeed a child died of the disease in Liverpool recently. The unfounded scare story has caused a drop in vaccination rates to a level that does not now stop the spread of the disease. 95% of the population needs to be covered to provide what is called herd immunity, so that the disease cannot spread.
In the USA, under the leadership of RFK, who is a vaccine denier, there have been serious outbreaks of measles that have necessitated – you guessed it – an emergency vaccination programme to stem the spread of the disease.
During the Covid pandemic, the widespread use of vaccines was used to control the outbreak and allow us all to move on and live normal lives. However, it seems that the massive vaccine programme has promoted doubts in users, and there are some doctors and politicians who are stoking the flames with false stories of vaccines causing harms.
It is undoubtedly true that patients can have side effects from vaccines, as they can from any medical treatment and some of these, particular to the Oxford Covid vaccine, were occasionally severe and sometimes fatal. This is absolutely tragic, and my heart goes out to the surviving families of these victims, some of whom I know.
Others had less severe but troublesome side effects that may persist.
However, following enormous clinical trials, it has been proven that far more people benefitted from vaccines than had side effects. That fact doesn’t help people who have had negative side effects, but it does not support the wholesale withdrawal of vaccines as some have suggested.
Reform UK have spotted what you could call a ‘gap in the market’, and it’s not a good one. Amongst the general population, around 84% trust and support vaccination, but amongst those who voted Reform in 2024, that drops to 50%. If you are an anti-vaxxer, Reform is the party for you – which is why, of course, they found a vaccine sceptic doctor and platformed him at their recent conference.
The danger is that fewer people will trust vaccines and infectious disease will again spread rampantly through the population. Exposing ourselves to unnecessary health risks is a threat to our national security, as dangerous as bioterrorism or industrial espionage. It is not something that any political party should advocate.
As doctors, we have an obligation to look at evidence in the cold light of scientific enquiry, and reject falsehoods – like, for example, the claim that the Covid vaccine caused the King’s cancer. There is no evidence to support this, and it is simply wrong.
To properly protect our children particularly, we must convince those with vaccine hesitancy that vaccines are safe and that you are far better off to have a jab than not to. We have to look to science and not be caught up in fanciful and fraudulent claims enabled by political parties to, at best, bolster their poll ratings, or at worst, facilitate something far darker.
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