One of the most vocal online communities is the anti-vaccination
movement. Members often congregate around the popular, but
baseless, claim that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine
causes autism. The rumours started in 1998 with a scientific paper –
since discredited and retracted – led by Andrew Wakefield, who was
later struck off the UK medical register. Unfortunately, the British
media picked up on Wakefield’s claims and amplified them.[13] This
led to a decline in MMR vaccination, followed by several large
outbreaks of measles years later, when unvaccinated children began
entering the bustling environments of schools and universities.
Despite widespread MMR rumours in the UK during the early
2000s, media reports were very different on the other side of the
channel. While MMR was getting bad press in the UK, the French
media were speculating about an unproven link between the hepatitis
B vaccine and multiple sclerosis. More recently, there has been
negative coverage of the HPV vaccine in the Japanese media, while
a twenty-year-old rumour about tetanus vaccines resurfaced in
Kenya.[14]
Scepticism of medicine isn’t new. People have been questioning
disease prevention methods for centuries. Before Edward Jenner
identified a vaccine against smallpox in 1796, some would use a
technique called ‘variolation’ to reduce their risk of disease.
Developed in sixteenth-century China, variolation exposed healthy
people to the dried scabs or pus of smallpox patients. The idea was
to stimulate a mild form of infection, which would provide immunity to
the virus. The procedure still carried a risk – around 2 per cent of
variolations resulted in death – but it was much smaller than the 30
per cent chance of death that smallpox usually came with.[15]
Variolation became popular in eighteenth-century England, but was
the risk worth it? French writer Voltaire observed that other
Europeans thought that the English were fools and madmen to use
the method. ‘Fools, because they give their children the smallpox to
prevent their catching it; and madmen, because they wantonly
communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their children,
merely to prevent an uncertain evil.’ He noted that the criticism went
the other way too. ‘The English, on the other side, call the rest of the