Measles cases are surging in Europe and the US. This is what the anti-vax conspiracy theory has brought us

Nearly 30 years after Andrew Wakefield’s discredited study linking the MMR vaccine and autism, we badly need an injection of rationality

It’s easy to say in hindsight, but also true, that even when the anti-vax movement was in its infancy in the late 90s before I had kids, let alone knew what you were supposed to vaccinate them against, I could smell absolute garbage. After all, Andrew Wakefield, a doctor until he was struck off in 2010, was not the first crank to dispute the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines. There was a movement against the diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough vaccine in the 1970s in the UK, and a similar one in the US in the early 1980s. The discovery of vaccination in the first place was not without its critics, and enough people to form a league opposed the smallpox rollout in the early 1800s on the basis that it was unchristian to share tissue with an animal.

So Wakefield’s infamous Lancet study, in which he claimed a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, going as far as to pin down the exact mechanism by which one led to the other, was new only in so far as it had all the branding of reputable research, when in fact it was maleficent woo-woo, a phenomenon as old as knowledge. It was noticeable, though, that it fell on parched ground – a lot of people were very keen for it to be true. That was partly simple news appetite: vaccines are inherently boring. Devised by humans co-operating with one another, motivated by nothing more complicated than a desire to help the species – and indiscriminately, no one baby more worthy of protection than any other – there is no animating conflict here, nothing hidden, no complexity. Is there anything more tedious than humanity at its finest? So wouldn’t it be at least piquant if it turned out to be a giant mistake?

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