Here’s one anniversary I won’t be celebrating: 10 years ago this week, the Lancet retracted an article published in 1998 that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. The retraction followed a General Medical Council (GMC) ruling that lead author Andrew Wakefield had been dishonest.

After the original paper, and despite the immediate objections raised by the medical community, there was a significant drop in MMR rates in the UK. In my GP surgery, rational people expressed concerns along the lines of “There’s no smoke without fire”, “I’ll wait until my child is older so that I can be sure they’re not autistic”, “My friend’s child was diagnosed with autism a few months after his MMR” and “I’ll get the jabs done privately so they can be given separately”.

Shaming or forcing people to do something that they are scared of is never a good idea

The success of vaccination programmes means that we get complacent and forget that these childhood infections can kill. Parents of babies born today in the UK are unlikely to ever come across measles or meningitis, and there hasn’t been a naturally occurring case of polio in the UK since 1984. A mother told me recently that she was against vaccination and didn’t believe the illnesses were a threat nowadays. She’s right – because most of the other children in her baby’s cohort will be vaccinated, hers is likely to be safe because of herd immunity. I sent her some links and asked her to reconsider. As GPs we’re not supposed to get cross so I didn’t say what I really thought.

On the whole, MMR rates have improved over the past 10 years although they remain just below the WHO recommended coverage of 95% or more. At its lowest ebb, in 2003-04, only 80% of under-twos in the UK were given MMR. Reasons for the improvement in uptake probably include the passage of time, detailed rebuttals of Wakefield’s work, the discovery of his possible conflicts of interest and the absence of further studies to validate his claims. The public appears to have recognised that sometimes there is smoke without fire.

Fear has also played a part in improving uptake. There have been measles outbreaks in Orthodox Jewish communities in the US and Europe. Local rabbis have responded by urging their followers to vaccinate their kids and there is some evidence that this has been effective.

But on a global scale, attitudes and wariness of officialdom can be harder to shift. The WHO is concerned that there were more cases of measles in 2019 than in any year since 2006 and that multiple countries have declared outbreaks. Inevitably, children in the lowest-income countries are most at risk. A measles outbreak late last year killed more than 6,000 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. But measles isn’t Sars or a new coronavirus, so the deaths attracted relatively little international attention.

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We live in paradoxical times. We buy more unproven, expensive “healthcare” products and treatments than ever before. Wellness products, such as those seen in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Lab on Netflix, enjoy enormous success, even as they are criticised by figures like the head of the NHS. Many seem willing, even happy, to suspend disbelief to buy into fake science. But among the enthusiasm for unproven therapies rests a profound scepticism to orthodox, evidence-based healthcare.

Committed anti-vaxxers sometimes display a sort of religious zealotry that makes attempts at dialogue deeply frustrating. But there is no reason to dismiss the concerns of parents and caregivers who worry about autism, the effects of vaccines and the interventions of the medical profession. Putting pressure on people, shaming them or forcing them to do something that they are scared of is never a good idea. Most people are reasonable: give them the data and they are only too pleased that their child has access to life-saving vaccinations.

• Ann Robinson is a GP