Measles is killing children – and adults – in Europe. There were 37 deaths in the first six months of this year, when there were 38 in the whole of the previous year. Between January and June, 41,000 people in the region caught the disease, which is one of the most infectious on the planet. That’s nearly double the number of cases in 2017.

Resurgence of deadly measles blamed on low MMR vaccination rates Read more

What is going on? Significant numbers of people are choosing not to have their children vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, against measles, mumps and rubella. The reasons they are making that choice and the implications of it are very concerning.

It would be easy to blame it on one man. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, then a gastroenterologist at the Royal Free hospital in London, published a paper in the Lancet that linked MMR to gut problems in children who had autism. The paper featured the cases of eight children. It might have been no big deal, except that, at a press conference, Wakefield advised against the triple MMR vaccine. The press ran lurid stories featuring children whose autism became evident at around the time they had their MMR jab and sent shivers through the hearts of many parents.

What happened next is well known. Parents in the UK kept their children away from the immunisation clinic at 18 months and at four years when the jabs were due. It takes 95% vaccine coverage to keep measles at bay. Immunisation rates dropped to 80%, and in pockets, particularly in some areas of London, as few as 65% of children had the jab. Measles cases rose sharply between 2001 and 2013.

MMR take-up in the UK is back to over 90%, but across Europe and in the United States we are seeing growing vaccine hesitancy and outright denial. It’s not just about Wakefield, who has been ejected from the medical profession in the UK but is now feted in some quarters of the United States – notably in Texas, where he lives. It’s about populism, anti-establishment anger, suspicion of authority, the questioning of science and rejection of the whole idea of the good of the community.

Donald Trump himself has been numbered among the vaccine sceptics, telling a story about a two-year-old who “got” autism a week after she had the MMR. Wakefield appeared at one of his inauguration balls. There was talk of Trump setting up a committee to review the “link” to autism under vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, although that didn’t happen.

In France, Marine Le Pen, who leads the National Rally (formerly Front National) party, has championed the right of the people to say no in the face of a move by the government to make 11 vaccines mandatory for children – as is the case for diphtheria, tetanus and polio currently. The plan has emerged because of increasing vaccine hesitancy and a low MMR immunisation rate.

Italy’s attempt to boost vaccination for children has run into major political problems. Last July health minister Beatrice Lorenzin made 10 vaccines mandatory for children enrolling in state-run schools, following concerns about measles outbreaks, with nearly 5,000 cases recorded last year (a rate second only to Romania in Europe). But the rise of the Five Star Movement appears to have put paid to that. The new health minister, Giulia Grillo, has now said parents will not be required to present schools with a vaccination certificate.

The founder of Five Star, Beppe Grillo (no relation), is a vaccine sceptic. Vaccines can be as dangerous as the diseases they protect against, he once asserted. In 2015 the party proposed changing the law on vaccination, citing “the link between vaccinations and specific illnesses such as leukaemia, poisoning, inflammation, immunodepression, inheritable genetic mutations, cancer, autism and allergies”. Scientific misunderstandings are common among the anti-vaccine movements, along with a failure to properly weigh experimental results. Not all scientific studies are equal. Vaccine denialists tend to be selective in their approach to the evidence.

Vaccine hesitancy does not map neatly on to party affiliation. Alongside the Trump-following populists and the rightwing anti-establishment individualists are the left-leaning Mother Earth-lovers. These are people who worry about injecting their children with chemical compounds in the same way that they worry about pesticides in their food.

Common to both groups is suspicion of big pharma. Anti-vaccine rhetoric cites pharmaceutical company scandals, of which there have been many. Multinational companies are only interested in profits and not to be trusted with children’s bodies, the doubters argue. These doubts spread globally online. You don’t see articles in newspapers arguing that vaccination causes autism any more, but that doesn’t matter in an era of social media. Mainstream scientists who want to demolish the conspiracy theories and bad science and explain how the evidence stacks up in favour of vaccinesare talking into a vacuum.

Measles is a serious disease. Your healthy daughter may not die from it, but the fragile child down the road or the older man whose immune system is compromised will struggle to survive an infection. Vaccination used to be for the good of the community. We were all part of a social compact. We were vaccinated and allowed our precious children to have jabs in order to deprive these diseases of a home in our midst. But this is another era, in which the individual is king, mistrust of authority is rife and vaccine-preventable diseases may well be making a major comeback.

• Sarah Boseley is the Guardian’s health editor