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Vaccination against freedom

’Go on, Its quite safe. Its only fair to the child.’ With these words, without breaking skin with a needle, a doctor immunises a mother. In order to create immunity to some diseases doctors administer vaccinations. Vaccines contain bacteria or viruses in weakened form. Most work by stimulating the production of antibodies to a disease. The aim of vaccination is to create long-term resistance to bacteria or viruses should they ever attack. But resistance to infection is not the only immunity created in Britain’s massive vaccination campaign.

According to the Health Education Authority (HEA), it is a simple fact that almost every child is better off vaccinated against certain diseases.

The HEA states that the danger to health of contracting whooping cough far outweigh the ‘over-publicised risks’ of brain damage caused by vaccination.

If health means nothing more than ‘the absence of disease’, then this assertion is probably true. But if work for health includes improving the mind as well as the body, then the HEA’s campaign is making people less healthy. The HEA is inoculating against curiosity. Just as vaccination against a disease offers a small dose of a virus in order to build up resistance to larger infections, so the authority offers a tiny dose of information in order to raise immunity to greater amounts.

The certain knowledge claimed by HEA is only one facet of a complicated picture. In its publication, Immunisation: information for parents, the HEA says that routine immunisation in the 1950s gradually reduced the number of children getting whooping cough. But this is first degree deception. In fact the trend in mortality from whooping cough taken from 1860 until the present day shows a steady fall. The graph of the decline is so uniform that the introduction of immunisation in the 1950s — far from producing a dramatic drop — is quite unnoticeable.

The HEA keeps other information to itself. It neglects to explain that immunisation can cause a range of unwanted effects.

It omits to mention that vaccines may provoke undesirable changes in the immune system, possibly contributing to future tumours and diseases such as multiple sclerosis. And it chooses to promote injections rather than launch a campaign for better nutrition and education.

Why does such selectivity with the evidence matter? Solicitors and car mechanics offer their clients only edited information. A solicitor does not relate the whole of the law of tort to a person seeking help with a claim for damages. A mechanic does not explain the theory of combustion to a person whose car needs a service. There is a limit to the amount of information that we can be usefully transmitted.

But in the case of health education it must be a contradiction to restrict information. An educated person is one who is able to survey the information on a subject, and who can make a reasoned choice. The HEA is not educating but manipulating. Education about immunisation must include the truth that the picture is not clear-cut but confusing. Not to present the facts may achieve a higher uptake of anti-viral vaccine, but by lessening choice the policy diminishes people’s freedom.

Next time you are offered a health education leaflet you may be wise to read it but not swallow it — preferring the challenge of deciding for yourself, rather than accepting another glossy vaccination against free thinking.