-
- The Observer,
- Sunday December 23, 2001
But the sheep are running amok. The script has developed Herodian overtones of damage to children. The battle of Leo's jabs, like the War of Jenkins' Ear, has escalated. Last week, Tony Blair declined to tell the Commons whether he and Cherie had flouted government advice and chosen single injections for their son. Now in the face of mounting suspicion, senior Whitehall sources have hinted strongly that Leo has had the triple injection after all.
This is all very curious. Why should the fact that the Prime Minister's son had a treatment recommended for all babies ever have been secret. What's the point of the contortions of the past week? Alan Milburn is threatening to boycott the Today programme, in protest at its inquisition of Jacqui Smith, who, like other Ministers, has apparently been urged not to disclose whether her children had the triple jab. The odd excuse for enforcing privacy by edict is, supposedly, that answering questions would lead to further impertinent inquiries on intimate family health matters, including whether Ministers' teenage children practised safe sex.
It is obvious that politicians should not have to disclose which brand of disposable nappies they favour, let alone anything more personal. MMR is different. The Government has used strongarm tactics to persuade people that they should give their children a controversial drug linked, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, with autism. It has declared the alternative, single, jabs unsatisfactory and made them unaffordable to most (except for those who can pay up to £500 for all three shots). At that point, choice and privacy expire. Politicians must openly treat their children as they exhort us to treat ours, or explain why.
Michael Brunson's story of how Mr Blair once traded shots of Euan playing the piano in return for scrapping Cherie's thoughts on a Downing Street life is often cited as proof that the Prime Minister is a selective invader of his children's privacy. It is hard not to be. When every radiant family Christmas card subtly bolsters Mr Blair's lustre, protecting privacy is a grey area. Except on MMR, where there is no privacy to protect.
By keeping single jabs off the NHS, the state has chosen the rare course of countermanding private choice. Parental judgment is deemed to involve such serious consequences - a return of the measles that used to affect 76,000 children a year and kill 16 - that individual freedom has been subjugated to the public good. Unlike universal primary education, which some parents also resisted, the triple jab could not quite be introduced by compulsion.
The Government has done the next best thing, in spending £3 million on promotion. Health visitors warn parents that selfish non-compliance makes a deadly epidemic more likely. The fact that the Blairs, it seems, heeded this advice, does not remove the Prime Minister from his bind. His unwillingness to confirm his choice of treatment is bound to make parents more doubtful. To what end? If the triple MMR jab is as obligatory as the Government claims, then asking whether a child has had it is no more intrusive that asking if he or she goes to school.
To turn a drug endorsed as safe throughout the world into a catalyst for national suspicion is some feat. How did Mr Blair do it? How did Cherie? Sexism and, perhaps, a wish to needle Mrs Blair, made her the first target of media truth-seekers. She, increasingly high-profile, has written in this paper on bullying. She has spoken out on her preferred dress code for Afghan women (no burkas) and, for charity, revealed her own sartorial wish-list for Christmas (a silk nightie from Selfridges). She has also consolidated her reputation as a crystal-wearing devotee of alternative medicine who recently persuaded her husband to join her in seeking their inner selves while being plastered in mud and passion fruit in a Mexican pyramid.
One minute, she is a fan of Flowtron trousers and destressing ear studs. The next, she is the most enlightened immunologist since Edward Jenner started injecting people with live cowpox. For the press steeply to upgrade her medical credentials is unsurprising. Anyone who sends for men in MoD serge when a teenage son needs help with a nuclear essay is likely to have done her own homework. If she will not endorse the triple jab, then parents inevitably think there is something amiss.
Cherie Blair's choices are her own. Her husband's are not. As a parent skilled in dealing with nappy changes and post-exam hangovers, he is party to all policy decisions on his children and other people's. When parents are told, by diktat, that injecting their babies with MMR is their public duty, it is axiomatic that the Prime Minister openly follows suit. To opt for single jabs and non-disclosure would have been indefensible. If information that he chose the triple jab is correct, his silence is barely explicable, given the consequences. Already, the vaccination rate is down to 84.2 per cent, the lowest since the combined injection was introduced in 1988.
But the story of Leo's jabs is not only for worried parents. It resonates with all those who find that their own immunity to cynicism over Labour's tactics could use a booster shot. The MMR fuss has been fuelled by a belief that, in assorted ways, the Government preaches one thing while doing something else. To take only the most recent example, Blair's conference assessment of Africa as 'a scar on the conscience of the world' translates with alarming ease into an export licence for a military air traffic control system that will enrich British Aerospace at the expense of starving Tanzania.
Meanwhile in Britain, at Christmas, one baby's bogus privacy is jealously guarded, while millions of less prominent infants are shooed off to have their MMR jabs done for the public good. It is not meant as any jibe to anxious parents, let alone to those of children who, for whatever reason, are autistic, to say that the Blair-driven fixation on slight or non-existent risk seems oddly disturbing at this time of this particular year.
British troops in Kabul may symbolise peace on earth, but their arrival will not halt the death of many Afghan babies displaced by war. According to the World Health Organisation, eight million lives lost every year to preventable diseases such as malaria and diphtheria could be saved, given the global investment of $66 billion. As for MMR, the best research and the latest evidence point to this conclusion. The triple vaccine has proved much safer for babies than for politicians.
