The real reason parents are hesitating
Exclusive UsForThem polling reveals a damning loss of trust in the Government's public health messaging
Media reports this week have warned of a spike in cases of measles among the country’s children, attributed by health officials to a slump in rates of MMR vaccination to its lowest level in more than a decade.
The fall in post-pandemic childhood vaccination rates is not in doubt with uptake falling below 75% in some cities and as low as 50% in some London boroughs.1 Encouraged by ministers and health officials, however, media reports have so far majored on anti-vax beliefs, fuelled by concerted scaremongering, as the cause of parental hesitation. The official line seems to be that public health policy and vaccines themselves are beyond criticism, so hesitancy must be down to the misguided fears of parents.
Indeed, in a scathing opinion piece published in the Daily Mail in November last year, the veteran broadcaster John Humphrys appeared to suggest that parents who hesitate to vaccinate their children against measles, or who might question the safety or necessity of a vaccine, reveal their “woeful ignorance, blind prejudice and simple stupidity”.2
Slinging insults at parents with legitimate concerns for the wellbeing of their children may not be a sensible strategy for any politician in an election year, but ministers and their shadows have nevertheless been similarly circumspect and diversionary in response to the expanding body of public, political and expert opinion calling for full transparency of the official data around Covid mRNA vaccine harms.
In a 16th January Westminster Hall debate on the UK’s excess deaths crisis, the Junior Health Minister, Maria Caulfield, cautioned MPs that any discussion of mRNA vaccine harms should not be allowed to undermine the public’s trust in vaccination policy; “We must be careful with the language we use … We should absolutely scrutinise the safety of vaccines, but we need to make sure that we are not deterring parents from coming forward”, she said. Abena Oppong-Asare MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Mental Health had earlier in that debate recorded the Official Opposition’s prejudged view that suggestions of a link between excess deaths and Covid mRNA vaccines “stokes fear and misinformation”.
Neither spokesperson seemed willing to contemplate the possibilities that it may be the UK’s vaccination policies which have undermined trust, or that parents should be allowed to make up their own minds on safety after seeing the official data on mRNA Covid vaccine dosage dates and deaths (data which reportedly has already been shared with the vaccine manufacturers but is otherwise being withheld even from vaccine experts).3
For those already heavily invested in the official line that Covid mRNA vaccines have always been extremely safe and effective, it may be comforting to believe that a key driver of the apparent erosion of parental trust in public health, and particularly childhood immunisations, is a small handful of “moronic anti-vaxxers” (to borrow again from John Humphrys) somehow having successfully caused baseless theories to gain widespread traction among formerly rational parents. But this is flatly contradicted by exclusive polling carried out for UsForThem.
Having despaired in Summer 2021 as the Government overrode the recommendations of its own expert vaccine advisory committee to roll out the novel mRNA Covid vaccine to healthy children at exceptionally low risk from Covid, and then exacerbated that cavalier decision by suggesting that the vaccine could be given to children without parental consent,4 our strong instinct was that this coercive and deceptive period of public health policymaking was likely to have undermined trust in public health, and especially in childhood immunisations. UsForThem decided to test that theory by carrying out independent polling to support research for The Accountability Deficit: How ministers and officials evaded accountability, misled the public and violated democracy during the pandemic.
The results of that polling present a clear, evidence-based reason for the declining uptake rates for Government-recommended childhood vaccines. Our data, available in full online,5 reveals that:
Only half the public (52%), and just 40% of 18-35 year olds, think the Government was honest about the risks and benefits of Covid vaccination.
Just 60% of parents of children under 18 say they would now be likely to give their child vaccines recommended by the Government (down from 84% having said that they would have done so prior to the pandemic).
Fewer than 1 in 3 (30%) think Ministers were honest about the necessity for Covid restrictions and 57% think Ministers were either dishonest or very dishonest. Overall 72% of people do not now trust Government briefings or other Government public health information.
In addition:
Less than 1 in 4 (23%) say they were aware that the JCVI had declined to recommend the rollout of the Covid vaccine for 12-15 year olds before the UK’s Chief Medical Officers overrode that advice. 68% say they were unaware.
Only 1 in 3 (32%) parents of children under 18 say they would still have wanted to get their child vaccinated had they known this, raising questions about whether consent to vaccination was properly informed consent. 42% say they would not have wanted their child to get the vaccine had they known this.
What this data evidences is that manipulative vaccination policies and deceptive propaganda campaigns, unsurprisingly, have decimated trust in public health, and childhood immunisations in particular. To restore trust, the Government and the Opposition will need to acknowledge the vaccination policy errors of the pandemic, especially concerning children, and to engage openly and transparently with the public about mRNA vaccine harms.
It is equally critical that we now rule out or confirm a causal connection between those mRNA harms and the UK’s current excess deaths crisis (of which it seems cardiovascular conditions form a substantial core). Unfortunately based on official responses in the Westminster Hall debate it appears that for now the Government (and, in a rare moment of solidarity, the Official Opposition) are instead minded to double-down. In doing so, they will only further erode the public’s trust.
If you enjoy Broken Custodians you may also like the new book by Molly, Arabella and Ben of UsForThem: THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT, How ministers and officials evaded accountability, misled the public and violated democracy during the pandemic, a civil liberties and political activism bestseller on Amazon. “Absolutely brilliant analysis … and extremely important for the future so that new generations of politicians can understand and avoid the same failures”, a reviewer has commented.
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Taxpayer-funded vaccination policy is a disaster area, and mired in conflicts of interest.
It’s way past time for an examination of the ever-increasing schedule, and particularly the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which is colonised by people associated with the vaccine industry, e.g. JCVI Chair Andrew Pollard.
Children and adults are being grossly exploited with vaccine products, this has reached a crescendo with the Covid debacle.
Children are being subjected to unnecessary vaccines such as flu and Covid jabs, to purportedly protect the elderly.
Now RSV is in the offing, plus chickenpox.
It’s completely insane.
We have no idea of the potentially deleterious consequences of the ever-increasing vaccine load.
This is the real emergency - the gross exploitation of the population with more and more vaccine products
Thanks for continuing to highlight this. The level of scaremongering at the time, willingly encouraged in the media, was unprecedented in my lifetime so the loss of public confidence is no surprise at all.