By Mark Langabeer, Hastings and Rye Labour member.
Judging by a recent Channel 4 programme, The Anti-vacc Conspiracy, the primary movers of the anti-vax campaign are motivated largely by financial gain or a thirst for personal publicity.
The documentary investigated the people behind the anti-covid vaccine movement and in the UK, the most high profile opponent of mass vaccination is Piers, the older brother of Jeremy Corbyn (pictured above). It is arguably the only reason for the large amount of publicity he receives.
He argues that the government’s pandemic policy, including mass vaccination, has curtailed our freedoms and has dangers which are kept secret from the public. In an interview, he claimed that ‘like us’, scientists have their price and uses the example of scientists who worked for the Nazis. It looks to me, that Piers, unlike brother Jeremy, holds onto a widely accepted – and wrong – view that humans are innately selfish. It is a cynical and false idea that humans are motivated solely by power and financial gain.
No link between autism and MMR jab
The programme traces the history of the anti-vax movement, with the story of Dr Andrew Wakefield. He got a lot of attention in the mass media with claims that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine caused autism and he advocated that the MMR jab should be separated into single jabs. As a result of his claims, there was a reduced uptake of the MMR jab in the late 1990s and this caused an increase in Measles.
It turned out that Wakefield had no evidence of a link between autism and the MMR jab and after proceedings by the British Medical Association, he was struck off the medical register. Fiona Godlee, the editor of the British Medical Journal, says that at the time, few people knew that Dr Wakefield had been paid £400,000 by a lawyer who hoped to benefit from suing the drug companies that produced the MMR vaccine. It has also emerged that Wakefield had patented a single vaccine for Measles and would have made a fortune if it had been introduced.
Godlee also comments that Wakefield left the UK and set up a company called Thought House, where he continued to claim a link between autism and vaccinations. “The culture of the US”, Godlee noted, “is different” and over there his views appear to carry more weight. As Wakefield himslef says, the US is more “receptive” to (so-called) wealth creation.
Donations from pharmaceutical company heir
Wakefield’s company is described as a charity and not-for-profit, but Robby Boyd, a financial investigator, found that the company had a small number of wealthy donors who included the heir to the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceuticals empire as well as a Hollywood movie star. Wakefield also advocates treatments and medications which offer no evidence-based remedy to autism…at considerable cost. Some of the documentary commentators compared Wakefield to a ‘snake oil salesman’, trading on vulnerable people.
The main reason why many mothers fell for Wakefield’s claims, is that autism can often emerge at or around the same age that the MMR jab is normally given. Powerful individuals like Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr (son of Bobby Kennedy) have given support to Wakefield’s claims. He even directed a movie that claimed American medical authorities were concealing information about the harmful effects of vaccines.
Paul Offit, a vaccinologist, and a senior adviser to the US Government, explained that thanks to people like Wakefield, Measles is on the rise again. Likewise, if the current Covid vaccine programme fails to meet its 80% target then come Winter a new wave of the virus is a real possibility.
High vaccine hesitancy in many countries
In Britain, the Covid vaccine roll out has the support of 90% of the adult population, yet in the US, as many as one in three have said that they wouldn’t take the jab.This figure is similar to the results of a survey which found a high vaccine ‘hesitancy’ rate among a majority of countries. The danger is that this could impact on the global effort to contain Covid and a return to some kind of social normality .
Imran Ahmed, from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate noted on the programme that ‘Wakefield’ is back with Covid. The Covid crisis is Manna from Heaven for anti-vaxxers and all sorts of conspiracy theories have gained currency. Wakefield himself has been the principle speaker at an anti-lockdown/anti-vax rally.
The documentary points out that there have been an extremely small number of people who have developed blood clots from some of the vaccines. However, the benefits far outweigh these small risks and vaccination offers a route out of the pandemic. As many scientists have pointed out, vaccination has to form an important part of a strategy to defeat the virus, in the same way that it has been used successfully in the past to eliminate or marginalise other dangerous diseases that were once endemic in the human population.
The programme is worth watching, and is still available on catch-up here.
