One fraudulent paper about twelve children dented a vaccine given 575 million times
By 2012 the MMR jab had been given some 575 million times, and measles deaths had fallen from about 2.6 million a year to 122,000. Then a single 1998 paper, later ruled dishonest and fully retracted, persuaded many parents to hold back, and British measles cases rose from 56 to 1,348 within a decade.
MMR combines vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella in one injection. After two doses, about 97 per cent of people are protected against measles, 88 per cent against mumps and at least 97 per cent against rubella. The first dose usually comes around twelve months of age; the second exists mainly to catch the 2 to 5 per cent who do not build measles immunity the first time. Combining the three is less painful than three simultaneous shots and works sooner than spacing them out, and Public Health England found that offering only the combined version from 1988 raised uptake.
Maurice Hilleman developed the vaccine, and Merck gained a US licence for it in 1971, after single vaccines for measles in 1963, mumps in 1967 and rubella in 1969. Before vaccination, measles was thought as unavoidable as death and taxes. The first 20 years of US measles vaccination are estimated to have prevented 52 million cases and 5,200 deaths, and the country declared the disease eliminated in 2000.
Side effects are usually mild, such as fever or a sore arm. Severe allergic reactions occur in roughly one in a million people, and about 1 in 40,000 children develop a temporary bleeding disorder called ITP in the six weeks after vaccination, a condition that natural measles also causes. Britain dropped a mumps strain called Urabe in the early 1990s after cases of mild, passing meningitis. A Cochrane review concluded the evidence supports mass immunisation aimed at eradicating measles.
The autism scare began with Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study of twelve children, written while he supported a rival vaccine. In 2010 the General Medical Council called the work dishonest, The Lancet withdrew it, and he was struck off. Many later studies found no link, a conclusion shared by the CDC, the NHS and Cochrane. UK uptake nonetheless fell from 92 per cent to under 80, and in 2017 a Minnesota outbreak struck a Somali-American community where fear of autism had lowered vaccination.
Source: MMR vaccine
