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?
Alongside that, there was a perception that autism diagnoses had gone through the roof, and that wasn’t wrong. The increase in recorded incidence was 787% between 1998 and 2018, and no amount of, “Steady on, guys – it might just be because we’ve got better at understanding what we’re looking at” would deter people from wishing for one simple answer. Wakefield also landed his bogus study just as performative parenting was getting under way – a new understanding of child-rearing, in which parenting well became the summit of moral excellence, and the way to prove your credentials was to be excessively cautious about absolutely everything. It seemed pretty Calvinist – the fundamentals of parenting superiority were mysterious, but you could spot the Chosen Parent by the fact that they never ran with the herd.
The depressing thing about the anti-vax timeline is that the collective global mind worked as it should and yet didn’t work at all. Other scientists tried to replicate Wakefield’s results, and couldn’t. The right questions were asked and he was discredited. The lie might have gone around the world, but when the truth finally did get its pants on, it won a decisive victory. Yet a generalised distrust of vaccination as a concept had been spawned, ready to meet any fresh infectious disease. That didn’t delay the Covid vaccine rollout – it’s hard to see how it could have been faster – but did sully the triumph with the loud disquiet of a minority who thought they were being deliberately poisoned by the state.
The effects of the MMR controversy, specifically, are revealing themselves now, nearly 30 years later: measles cases in Europe are at the highest levels in 25 years; in the US, cases are at a 33-year-high; last week a child in Liverpool died having contracted measles. It’s unknown whether the child was vaccinated (no vaccine can guarantee complete immunity) and it doesn’t matter – it wouldn’t make it any less tragic if that child’s parents had been caught in the swirl of misinformation, or any more tragic if they hadn’t. And it wouldn’t be germane anyway: everybody is better protected when everybody is vaccinated. This is never a decision you are making just for yourself.
It’s probably the most depressing conspiracy theory there is, not because the impacts are so much graver than some cranks who believe the Earth to be flat, but because vaccination is the most concrete proof of how much we rely on one another’s care and rationality. That’s true beyond disease – we also need each other for democracy, science, culture, civic life and everything – but in no other area can you see that, count it and put it on a graph.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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