Earlier this week, a former chairman of the British Medical Association, Sir Sandy Macara, proposed that children should not be allowed to attend school unless they had been innoculated with the MMR vaccine (the BBC's report is here). I have just been watching BBC television's Question Time programme, where most panellists - not all, sadly - supported the MMR vaccine, but declined to support Macara's position on the grounds that it was not fair to "take it out on the children". What none of them ventured to say was whether it would be fair on the other children in school to be exposed to a life-threatening contagious illness from an unvaccinated child.
The NHS has a very helpful vaccination website, where two particularly salient facts are given:
- In the year before the vaccine was introduced in the UK, 86,000 children caught measles and 16 died.
- Because of the MMR vaccine, no child has died from acute measles in the UK since 1992.
The graph to the right shows how measles cases have been rising since the media started printing scare stories about MMR. If we can ban smokers from pubs on the grounds that their smoke endangers the health of other patrons, why can't we ban unvaccinated children from school on the grounds that they are similarly endangering the health and life of their peers?
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Hi,
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