I fell for the antivax lies, then measles put my son in hospital
As the whites of her five-year-old son’s eyes turned red and doctors warned he could have measles-related pneumonia, a terrified Jade Hurrell burst into tears.
The reality of the infection hit home as she watched her son, Cairo, being wheeled away for an X-ray of his lungs. He had never been vaccinated against measles and had been taken to hospital after deteriorating over several days with a severe fever and worsening cough.
Hurrell, 35, said last week: “I was very upset, I was crying. I hadn’t realised pneumonia could happen. It was very scary and horrible to watch when it got so serious.”
She had decided not to vaccinate her son and ten-year-old daughter, India — who also became ill with measles — after reading misinformation online about the MMR jab and false claims that it was linked with autism. “It was a conscious choice not to vaccinate,” she said. “We did all the other vaccines apart from MMR and we were just unsure about that one.”
She now says she wished she had got the jab for her children, adding: “I wasn’t aware what was said about it was false. It is infuriating to know that now.”
She decided to speak out following the death from measles of a child in Liverpool, where an outbreak has resulted in at least 17 patients being treated at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.
Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool has treated at least 17 children for measles
ALAMY
An increasing number of outbreaks are being reported across England after vaccination rates slumped to their lowest in a decade, well below the threshold needed for herd immunity.
In Bristol, 47 confirmed cases of measles have been reported since the start of the year. There was a cluster of cases in a primary school — a number of pupils became sick — followed by outbreaks across the city. Several children have required hospital treatment. About 15 per cent of children in Bristol have not been fully vaccinated against measles, which can cause serious complications, long-term disability and death.
Adam Finn, professor of paediatrics at the University of Bristol and an honorary consultant in paediatric infectious diseases at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, said: “The truth is that we in the UK, but also other European countries, have been storing up this problem for many years. Each year you have a number of children not immunised and then they continue to be non-immune throughout their childhood. So you achieve a sufficient population of people through to adulthood who are sitting there waiting to get measles because they’ve never been vaccinated.
“Once you store up enough people in the population, the occurrence of measles is just an inevitability. If you have enough cases, then you will get the deaths and you will get the children who are blind and all the bad things that measles can occasionally do.”
He said the way to stop this was to get vaccination rates back to the 95 per cent threshold and have catch-up vaccinations of adults who may still be vulnerable. He said it was vital the media and health professionals took on misinformation about vaccines.
“This kind of behaviour of spreading myths and false ideas is a feature of human behaviour throughout history,” Finn said. “The fact that people are being misled is a failure of communication. If the tools exist to put out misinformation, the tools also exist for us to put out accurate information and we need to do better.
“It’s up to us to win the war here and put out the information, put out the truth, because otherwise this problem is just going to get worse.”
It is easy to find evidence of antivax propaganda on social media. For example, a Facebook group with almost 25,000 members called Safe Space For Anti Vaccines Moms And Dads has lots of UK members.
In the group earlier this month a mother raised concerns about rising measles cases and was encouraged not to “poison” her unvaccinated children.
While it is true that most children who caught measles in the past did survive, many did not. In 1941, 1,145 people died in England and Wales. The annual number of deaths was regularly in the hundreds until vaccinations became widespread after 1968.
Once the vaccine became universal the disease was almost eliminated — between 2000 and 2017 there were just 14 deaths.
During the pandemic, social media sites came under significant pressure to remove overt anti-vaccination content. Meta has a lengthy policy on vaccines and says it removes content when “public health authorities conclude that the information is false and likely to directly contribute to imminent vaccine refusals”.
There are ways of getting around these safeguards. Antivaxers use the word “cupcake,” or the cupcake emoji, in place of the word “vaccine“ to circumvent Facebook’s filters.
Lots of online antivax conversations also take place in closed groups on apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Users refer each other to books that are freely available for purchase on Amazon and push a vaccine-sceptical message. Some are very popular, and take a sophisticated approach to antivax messaging.
They stay clear of some of the wild conspiracy theories on the movement’s fringes, but instead bamboozle the reader with medical jargon and encourage the user to be sceptical of authority, including the medical experts who overwhelmingly agree that vaccines do far more good than harm.
Hurrell agreed with Finn that doctors needed to engage with parents like her who had doubts about vaccines.
She said: “I remember voicing concerns and many doctors being judgmental. But I think if they had given me more information about what might happen rather than talking to you like you’re a bad parent, it would be better. That makes you not talk and you just make the decision not to vaccinate. They need to hear people out and have a more open conversation about it.”
Her son fell ill after attending a football camp in Bromley, London, at the end of May, suffering from a headache and low energy. Over the next few days he developed a serious fever and characteristic red spots over his face and body.
“It spread all across his back and down his legs and his cough got worse and worse,” she said. “Then his heart rate started to spike and went up quite a bit and the hospital had him on all the machines, which was really scary and not nice to see at all.”
He was treated with antibiotics and discharged from hospital to home where the family had to isolate for almost two weeks after India contracted measles from her brother.
“I had always foolishly put measles into the same category as chicken pox which I now know is wrong. In hindsight I should have done a lot more research into it and been more aware of everything,” she said.
“My whole family are sick and tired of me talking about vaccines now. I know it seems very hypocritical but having experienced it, I didn’t vaccinate my children and it was very, very scary.”
