Andrew Miller: Anti-vaxxers need an injection of common sense

West Australian

15-06-2025

The teachers were already hoarse from shouting, coping the best they could with a gaggle of kids even more excitable than usual.
'Make a line and be quiet, knuckleheads!' growled Mr Woods.
We were a squirming, '70s vaccination line, until scrawny Sean's turn. He staggered forward, put both arms behind his back and promptly threw up on the nurse and her trolley of medical paraphernalia. The class fell quiet at last — a pause before the deafening cheers.
Public health is rarely glamorous. As with seatbelts, pool fences and speed limits, when your job is to prevent something happening, the credit is only theoretical. The most exciting outcome is a downward trend on a graph.
This gives rise to survivor bias, which leads to people removing effective safety measures — precisely because they are working.
Begrudgingly I went for blood tests the other day to prove my immunity, for the hospital administration. They wanted to see my vaccination card from the day Sean threw up, but Mum had filed it under 'not my problem' decades ago.
As a nurse expertly drew my blood, I thought of Edward Jenner — not Kim Kardashian's uncle, but the 18th-century physician.
A thoughtful scientist, Jenner heard that milk maids who contracted cowpox did not suffer from the similar, but far more severe disease of smallpox. He grabbed a school kid, infected them with cowpox, then later smallpox — ah the good old days — and voila, the kid was fine.
Jenner had invented vaccination, and just like that — anti-vaxxers.
With every medicine, there can be side effects and problems, but his initiative has saved more humans from death and disability than any other medical intervention, by a long shot.
There are 27 main vaccines available for preventable diseases in Australia and together they form one pillar of our good fortune. Our children rarely die early, and some cancers — such as cervical — are in rapid decline.
We are getting through COVID-19 so far with much better outcomes than the rest of world, because we delayed infection until after vaccination.
It is dark news indeed that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr has replaced the world-recognised experts of the US Advisory Committee for Immunisation Practices with an oddball assortment including anti-vaxxers and public health sceptics.
Among them, Professor Martin Kulldorff, co-author of the infamous 'let-it-rip and see who survives' Great Barrington Declaration plan for COVID-19.
Also, Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse who asserts that much of the chronic disease burden in the US was caused by vaccination.
Then there is Dr Robert Malone, who weighed in on the April measles death of unvaccinated eight-year-old Texan Daisy Hildebrand, minimising the danger of the virus and spreading debunked claims about the MMR vaccine. Malone claims that it was botched treatment, not measles, that led to her death.
The problem for Australia is that vaccine hesitancy is contagious online, and it's easier to not get a jab than to bother. Normal people are busy and just want the best for their kids. Our slothful governments are not investing enough money, ingenuity and passion in public health promotion.
To maintain herd immunity, where those few who cannot be vaccinated are protected because almost everyone else is, we need coverage of over 95 per cent of the population with MMR vaccine.
Our fortunate population has little experience of children dying from infectious diseases, so can be prompted to wonder if vaccines are strictly necessary, or worse, if they might be causing more harm than good.
With well-resourced misinformation it would not be hard to give measles the comeback nobody needs.
Jenner might have dared dream that 200 years after his invention we could have eliminated most plagues. Unfortunately, that would have accorded too much wisdom to our species.
Yet may we hope, as there are many countries like ours watching on in horror as the US sabotages its own future.
Let their misfortune be no wasted lesson for us.