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Not having the MMR vaccine could have left me infertile

Rohan Silva
Rohan Silva

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but lately I’ve become weirdly comfortable discussing my testicles with total strangers.

You see, my wife Kate and I spent almost a decade trying to have a baby, and the problem was entirely on my side — my, erm, “wigglers” aren’t as plentiful as they’re supposed to be. To find out why I was falling short, I recently took a battery of tests, mostly involving getting my groin fondled by a man in a white coat. This was followed by me making an awkward situation even worse by asking the fondler if he’d like to cuddle afterwards. Thanks to all these clinical caresses, our fertility doctor is finally honing in on a cause for my low sperm count. The most likely explanation is the measles attack I suffered when I was younger.

I was born in Yorkshire in 1980, so just missed out on the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which was introduced in the UK in 1988. And back when I was a lad, eight out of every 10 people contracted mumps at some point — most of them kids of school age, like I was when I was struck by measles, which caused collateral damage to my nether regions.

Make no mistake, these diseases can be a terrible blight. Before the vaccine, around five people would die from mumps each year in Britain. And one in three people who caught the virus would be affected by complications — most commonly diarrhoea and vomiting, but potentially stretching all the way to permanent damage to the nervous system.

For a good while, Britain’s MMR policy worked. The World Health Organization declared the country to be “measles free” — and critically we’d hit very high vaccination rates, which is key for what’s called “herd immunity”. Because measles is so monumentally contagious — one of the most infectious diseases known to science — you need almost everyone to get vaccinated to get results.

Vials of MMR vaccine (AP)
Vials of MMR vaccine (AP)

The American writer Eula Biss puts it like this: “You’re more likely to catch an infectious disease [such as mumps] if you’re a vaccinated person in a totally unvaccinated community, than if you’re an unvaccinated person in a totally vaccinated community. Vaccination is not all that effective if only one person does it, but it’s incredibly effective if nearly everyone does it.”

That’s why it’s so important that everyone gets the MMR jab. Take children who’ve been tragically hit by childhood cancer, for example — their weak immune system may mean they can’t get vaccinated, so they’re totally reliant on everyone else getting their jabs.

And yet in our country today, it’s shocking to realise that as many as one in seven five-year-olds may not be up to date with their MMR immunisation — rising to one in four in London, which is a shameful statistic for our city. The consequence? According to government data, there were more than 5,000 cases of mumps in the UK last year — the highest number for a decade — and 2020 is likely to be even worse, with almost three times as many cases this January compared to 2019.

This atrocious state of affairs has been driven by anti-vaccine hysteria and lies spreading — ironically enough — like a virus. Just this week, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania found that people who mainly get their news from social media rather than traditional outlets are far more likely to believe antivax mistruths.

Australia practises “no jab, no pay” — if you don’t get all the vaccines on offer, you lose some child welfare

The good news is that there are a proven set of policies to get people vaccinating — and they’ve been implemented in Australia, France and other developed countries, even as the British health authorities have been pussyfooting around with “social media summits” and other feckless initiatives.

Let me use Australia to explain the approach — and don’t forget, this is the country that has pioneered many of the most successful public health initiatives, such as plain cigarette packaging, that have found their way to our shores.

In Oz, the policy is called “No jab, no pay” — and it means that if you choose not to get all the free state-funded vaccines on offer, you lose some of your child welfare payments. The effect has been rapid, and impressive: in a single year, the number of children being vaccinated in Australia shot up by 174,000. On top of this federal policy, most Australian regional governments also require full immunisation to use childcare facilities — unless the infant has an approved medical exemption. France and several other nations have followed suit.

Why are our ministers being so slow to adopt this proven strategy? I think the issue is an old-fashioned British squeamishness about intervening in other people’s family lives. In this case, that’s a very real mistake. After all, there’s another tradition that runs deep in this country — one that recognises myriad ways in which we’re all reliant on one another, expressed in our common institutions, such as the welfare system and the National Health Service.

Looked at through this lens, UK parents who choose not to vaccinate their children aren’t just endangering their own offspring — they’re putting other people’s kids at risk, particularly the most vulnerable in our society.

This runs counter to the social responsibilities we have to one another, which is why the Government would be entirely justified — as it has been in Australia and so many other countries — to compel parents to vaccinate their children for the common good. As Martin Luther King Jr put it so beautifully, we’re all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

In other words, none of us are strangers. Not really. Requiring parents to vaccinate their children is a recognition of this deep truth — and our fundamental interconnectedness to one another.