A child’s death from measles has sparked urgent calls from British public health officials to get children vaccinated, as the UK faces an onslaught of misinformation on social media, much of it from the US.
Measles is a highly infectious disease that can cause serious complications. It is preventable through double measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination in early childhood.
British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting on Monday last week confirmed to parliament that a child had died in the UK of measles. No details have been released, but the Sunday Times and Liverpool Echo newspapers reported that the child had been severely ill with measles and other serious health problems in Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool.
Photo: AFP
Anti-vaxxers quickly posted unconfirmed claims about the death on social media.
One British influencer, Ellie Grey, who has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, posted a video denying the child died from measles.
“Measles isn’t this deadly disease... it’s not dangerous,” she wrote.
Grey criticized Alder Hey Hospital for posting a video “really, really pushing and manipulating parents into getting the MMR vaccine.”
Her video was reposted by another British influencer, Kate Shemirani, a struck-off former nurse who posts health conspiracy theories.
“No vaccine has ever been proven safe and no vaccine has ever been proven effective,” Shemirani falsely claimed.
Liverpool Director of Public Health Matthew Ashton attacked those spreading misinformation and disinformation about childhood immunizations in the Echo, saying “they need to take a very long, hard look at themselves.”
“For those of you that don’t know, measles is a really nasty virus,” he said in a video, adding that the vaccination is a way of “protecting yourself and your loved ones.”
Alder Hey Hospital said that it has treated 17 children with measles since last month.
It posted a video in which a pediatric infectious diseases consultant, Andrew McArdle, addresses measles “myths,” including that the MMR jab causes autism.
This false claim comes from a debunked 1998 study by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who was later struck off, but it sparked an international slump in vaccinations.
Benjamin Kasstan-Dabush, a medical anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that there are still “lingering questions around the Wakefield era.”
He talked to parents who had delayed vaccinating their children, finding reasons included life events and difficulty getting health appointments, but also misinformation.
“We’re obviously talking about a different generation of parents, who might be engaging with that Wakefield legacy through social media, through the Internet, and of course through Kennedy,” he said, referring to US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has promoted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Kennedy fired all 17 experts on a key vaccine advisory panel and appointed a scientist who warned against COVID-19 jabs.
In the US, “misinformation is being produced in the highest echelons of the [US President Donald] Trump administration,” which “circulates across the Internet,” Kasstan-Dabush said.
In a sign of how narratives spread, a Telegram group airing conspiracies called Liverpool TPR, which has about 2,000 members, regularly posts links to anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense once chaired by Kennedy.
In the past few weeks the UK Health Security Agency has amplified its social media coverage on vaccinations, a spokesman said.
In a video in response to the reported death, Vanessa Saliba, a consultant epidemiologist, explained the MMR jab protects others, including those “receiving treatment like chemotherapy that can weaken or wipe out their immunity.”
Take-up of the MMR jab needs to be 95 percent for herd immunity, according to the WHO. The UK has never hit that target.
In Liverpool, uptake for both doses is only about 74 percent and below 50 percent in some areas, Ashton said, while the UK rate is 84 percent.
After Wakefield’s autism claims, confirmed measles cases topped 2,000 in England and Wales in 2012 before dropping, but last year cases soared again.
The same trend is happening elsewhere.
Europe last year reported the highest number of cases in more than 25 years; the US has recorded its worst measles epidemic in more than 30 years.
Canada, which officially eradicated measles in 1998, has registered more than 3,500 cases this year.
“You’re fighting against the wall of disinformation and lies,” Ontario infectious diseases doctor Alon Vaisman said.
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