'Letting your kid catch measles is child abuse - and maybe manslaughter'

19 January 2024 , 12:29

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Don't be a measle weasel

Imagine a shocking new disease so bad it can kill or leave you brain-damaged, and even a light dose of it means you have to be shut up in your room without light, devices, or human contact for three weeks.

It is so infectious you can catch it by walking into a room several hours after someone else coughed. Every individual passed it on to another 15. Every bus, train, office, hospital ward and classroom in the country is filled with viral droplets more contagious than the Baby Shark earworm.

Oh, and there's no cure. Not even a whizzy-new bit of RNA-reprogramming like they came up with for Covid. The World Health Organisation declares this "one of the most contagious diseases humans have ever faced" and suddenly, out of nowhere, it's infecting 30 million people a year and killing 7% of them.

Then you find out this virus has been known about for 1,200 years, there's been a vaccine for 63 years, and you've had it so you're safe. What a relief!

Hooray for us! Tra-la-LA! (Getty Images)

Except you won't let your child have it. Your GP sends reminder letters you ignore. Your child's school posts health alerts. You know your child helps to spread every bug going round, and despite all the opportunities for an entirely free method of protection for your them and all the others in their class, you decide: "Nah. Let's see who gets brain damage, instead."

Baby boy has spent his life in hospital as doctors are 'scared' to discharge him

If that sounds like you, then you're gambling with the lives of children as surely as if you were letting them spin the barrel of a gun loaded with a single bullet, putting it against their head and pulling the trigger. You are opening them up to the possibility of harm - even if it's only three weeks off school, no friends, no devices, no daylight, and the risk of encephalitis and pneumonia. It would be better if you told them to play hopscotch on the M25, because if you did that you'd be arrested for endangering them.

It is an offence to ill-treat, abandon, neglect, or fail to protect a child in your care. Causing or allowing a child to die or suffer serious physical harm is a form of domestic abuse. A guilty parent can be sentenced to anything from a community order to life imprisonment. And yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, the measle weasels who damage a child by failing to protect them from deadly and damaging disease don't go to court, don't get egged, don't even get criticised by the powers that be.

And the failure to be tougher is why a national incident has now been declared with Britain facing its biggest outbreak of measles since the 1990s.

The measles virus could have been eradicated in the UK - instead its growing

That was the decade in which the appalling Andrew Wakefield used dodgy data to declare an entirely-bogus link between the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. It was amplified by the media, there was general panic, and then his work was debunked, he was struck off for behaving "dishonestly and irresponsibly", and he left the country showing not an ounce of the shame he should for the uptick in cases Britain has seen since.

To be scrupulously fair, he urged parents to get single jabs instead of combining them. But it was later found he'd applied for a patent on just such a vaccine before making his public pronouncements, and the 'research' began to look more like an 'advert'. There was such a stink over the MMR jab that thousands of parents not only refused it, but refused others as well.

And yes, there are some people who have a bad reaction to vaccines. They usually have a pre-existing medical condition that impacts their immune system, and doctors can give those patients other options. The few healthy people who'd notice feeling ropey after a MMR will be just that - a bit ropey. The chances of having an allergic reaction so bad it might kill you is one in a million.

That's the same as the chance of being struck by lightning THREE times.

If there was a vaccine against lightning, would you get it? (Essex Fire Service)

This outbreak is focused on the West Midlands and is moving to London. Both areas have dense, urban populations, which are more likely to be poor, multi-lingual, and people of colour. In a country that's been run by posh white boys for centuries, there are plenty of communities not inclined to believe the government is acting in their best interests.

And in the wake of a pandemic in which the people who arrange, sort, and deliver vaccines were all diverted to the Covid efforts, more people than usual slipped through the cracks. Many of those who are unvaccinated now are teens and young adults - those whose parents believed the Wakefield scare stories - and may not even be aware they should have the jab, but don't.

Reaching all those people to kindly inform, educate, and gently persuade them to pop along to the quack, when they have a moment and nothing better to do, would take years, and as it's been tried already plainly isn't working well enough. A handful of child cruelty prosecutions to the most deserving, on the other hand, would dominate the news and get them queuing round the block - if the courts get round to it, the jails can find room, and patients can get an appointment with the GP.

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And therein is why this madness is allowed to continue - those at the top of the heap can't imagine what it's like to not trust posh white boys, to believe internet theories, or be in serious need of medical care, in the same way they don't understand why courts, jails, and GPs, need to be provided for the use of people other than themselves.

All those people who have denied their children this vaccine have no idea what this disease does, because they didn't get it. It is grandparents who last endured it in large numbers - half a million people had measles in 1953, compared to 1,000 or 2,000 a year who get it now - and even they may have lost track of the fact unvaccinated adults get measles too, and it can affect them worse than children.

But it's no excuse. Any parent who prevents their child getting a vaccine, without a good medical reason, is guilty of abuse. If their kid doesn't die or wind up brain-damaged, then another will. To send your child into the world unprotected from some of the worst harms it holds, while you sit at home with an armour-plated immune system thanks to the science and parents who knew better, shows a criminal level of hypocrisy. When it leads to deaths, it should be treated as manslaughter.

The only way to get the message across is to either jail the worst offenders, or wait for every anti-vax prat to watch Year 3 be decimated and let them work it out the hard way. Personally, I'd pick the one with fewest funerals involving tiny white coffins. What about you?

Fleet Street Fox