The big blunder over MMR jabs is to appeal to self-interest
By Andrew Gimson
(Filed: 12/02/2002)

THE Government has made an elementary blunder in its handling of the MMR scare. By concentrating all its efforts on persuading parents that the vaccine is safe, it has colluded in the fiction that the decision about whether or not to allow a doctor to administer it to your child is an exclusively private one.

The wrangle about whether Leo Blair has received the jab served only to intensify the impression that the Government agrees this is an entirely private matter, with parents under the simple obligation to do whatever is best and safest for their children.

The result is that ministers have utterly failed to get across another, very strong argument in favour of giving your children the MMR jab, which is that this might help to save the lives of other children. If your child gets measles, he or she will probably be all right, just as you were when you got it as a child.

But as Paul Ince, professor of neuropathology at Sheffield University, has pointed out: "About half the deaths from measles in the past were in children with illnesses like leukaemia who could not be immunised because of the suppression of their immune system by disease or therapies such as anti-cancer drugs and steroids."

If, by failing to get your child vaccinated, you help to create the conditions for a measles epidemic, you are putting some vulnerable children in much greater danger.

One can see why ministers have funked making this point, or have done so only by quoting, as I have just done, the testimony of scientists. For it would plainly be intolerable for the Government to instruct us to put our own children in danger of autism, simply to promote the greater good of society.

That way lies the most hideous totalitarianism, in which any number of individuals are sacrificed at the behest of the central power. The question of whether the vaccine is safe for the child who actually receives it is a vital one.

My wife and I believe the jab is safe, and have recently had one of our children vaccinated. But ministers and health officials who imagine their work is done once they have answered the doubts of individual parents about safety are grievously mistaken.

The duty of politicians, however difficult this might seem, is to articulate their understanding of the public good, not just to encourage us in the illusion that in deciding how to lead our lives, we need think only of our own private benefit.

There is a rather depressing tendency in our politicians to assume that we will respond only to appeals to our self-interest. Mr Blair yielded to this low view of us when he said last week in Nigeria that "if Africa gains, we gain", and went on to assert: "There is no leafy suburb far from the reach of bad things and bad people, not in your country, not in mine, not in any part of the world."

In order to keep Acacia Avenue free from crime and litter and yobbish behaviour, not to mention international terrorism, Mr Blair has to travel to west Africa. This is a debatable proposition, but it sounds so implausible and insincere above all because of what it leaves out.

The Prime Minister, to his credit, went on to give what will strike most people as the overwhelming justification for engaging with Africa: "When an African child dies every three seconds, the developed world has a clear duty to act."

Duty is a word that has nothing to do with self-interest. We may or may not, as things turn out, be rewarded for doing our duty, but that is not the point. It is perhaps a word that the wartime generation finds easier to comprehend than those of us born later, into a world of affluent self-indulgence, but the concept remains indispensable.

During the MMR debacle, the Government has fought shy of using it. The Government is happy to place doctors under an obligation to vaccinate the overwhelming majority of children, but says nothing (or nothing audible) about the duty of parents, provided they are satisfied the vaccine is safe, to give it to their children.

The result has been to sow the seeds of distrust between doctors and patients, with doctors suspected of declining into mere government stooges, unless, like Andrew Wakefield, they take refuge in the United States.

The result has also been to sow, or water, the seeds of distrust between government and the governed. We have not been taken into ministers' confidence: we are not trusted, once we understand what the right course of action is, to play our humble but essential part in the prevention of epidemics which, if allowed to rage, will kill or cripple dozens of children, though with any luck not our own.

Politicians find it hard sometimes to understand why they are so despised, but here is a classic instance. We are not treated as free men and women, as capable as the official classes of taking responsible decisions. We are instead to have a publicity campaign directed against us, led by the hapless Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer.

Part of the difficulty for Labour politicians, or at least for the more boneheaded Blairites, is that they know they returned to power in 1997 in large part because they accepted the sweeping measures of privatisation carried out by the great reforming Conservative administrations that preceded them.

They know that if they start talking about duty, they might be suspected of preaching the kind of state socialism that went out of fashion in 1951, or at the latest in 1979.

But duty is a far older concept than socialism, and for many of us the whole point of reaching, through the wonderful workings of a free-market economy, some degree of material independence is that we can then afford to act in a disinterested way, whether by baking a cake for the WI or helping to look after a neighbour frailer than ourselves.

There is no sense, in this Government, that we might be valued partners in a common endeavour, able of our own free will to give help that no state apparatus can ever fully replicate. Statism takes the place of self-reliance, and, treated like infants by our politicians, we respond by treating them as liars.