Letter

The establishment are needled

Dear healthmatters—Thanks for keeping the debate going about vaccination. I would like to highlight some political points about the process of this debate. The official health promoters’ (OHP) case is characterised by smugness and the dissenters’ by exasperation. These ordinary emotions reveal differences in the social history of the two groups.

The OHP position is based upon the self-assured authority of a social engineering model of health promotion, circa 1900. It has accumulated the understandable support of various dominant interest groups, including governments, the medical profession and the vaccine producers.

As a consequence, the OHP case makes brief authoritative statements which are unclouded by awkward evidence about iatrogenic damage and the moral responsibility of government to pay for that damage. Its case has other telling silences about: its own shifting advice over the years; those diseases which have arisen and diminished in incidence without the presence of vaccines; vaccine failures; the incompatibility of lifestyle health promotion strategies and the ‘technical fix’ of vaccination; and the role of poverty and diet in disease susceptibility.

This smugness is leading to a breakdown in the trust of ordinary people in medical experts. People are producing their own risk assessments which are driven by a full and honest appraisal of the evidence, not by the above list of silences.

Those of us who are weary and wary of social engineering, and live circa 2000, experience the exasperation of challenging vested dominant interests. What is encouraging about the letters from the OHP lobby is that there are signs that it is getting rattled. My hope is that this brittle rattle becomes a shake.