Anti-vax nonsense has left children vulnerable to measles but open to botox - David Behrens

Let’s start in Bradford, where a cottage industry in supplying illegal botox operations to children under 18 appears to be flourishing – so much so that a local politician went on record last week to urge teachers to start reporting suspected cases to the authorities.

Trading Standards officers have written to more than 50 cosmetic surgeries across the area – yes, there are that many – reminding them of their obligations. But they acknowledge it’s not something they can easily police.

There are many reasons a young person might want selective cosmetic surgery and none of them are sound. Vanity, peer pressure, lack of confidence – these are growing pains as old as time itself, their causes too deeply rooted to be cured by an injection of face filler. But when we make Botox as easily available as cigarettes, the quick fix it affords outweighs the risk of mutilation.

It’s not just a local problem. Three years ago England banned cosmetic fillers for under-18s following reports of 40,000 such injections in the previous year alone. But the practice continues, at cowboy salons with scant regard for the law and in Scotland and Wales, where the new regulations don’t apply. It’s now said that under-18s are taking trains across the border to get their fixes.

For today’s teens, the insecurities that have always festered in classrooms are amplified many times over by the internet, where social media substitutes for an actual social life. So it’s easy to understand their lack of judgement.

Their parents’ generation ought to know better. Yet ignorance and misinformation surrounding healthcare has brought about an even greater emergency for which there is no quick fix.

On Monday it was revealed by NHS statisticians – of whom we retain plenty, despite having run out of GPs – that the country is seeing outbreaks of measles, a preventable disease we thought we had eradicated decades ago. There have been 300 probable cases since last autumn, nearly all in children under 10 and many in the same city, Birmingham.

The reasons are clear: nearly 3.5m under 16s have not been fully vaccinated – despite the jabs being freely available and regardless of the fact that measles patients often need to be rushed to hospital.

What parent would subject their child to such a risk? And how many parents have seen children suffer unnecessary cosmetic surgery while being denied the medicine of life?

It doesn’t take a statistician to tell you that no-one with the right information and a modicum of intelligence would behave in such a way, but good information is the one thing in shorter supply than doctors’ appointments. That’s not in spite of the internet but because of it.

What we are seeing is the legacy of years of conspiracy theories that have swirled around vaccines in general and the measles, mumps, and rubella inoculation in particular.

The stuck-off doctor Andrew Wakefield lit the fire when he raised the possibility – on the basis of research long since discredited – that the combined MMR vaccine was linked to autism. But not even he was advocating children be left unprotected; he wanted separate vaccines for each disease.

He published his findings in The Lancet, the medical journal which is read by doctors but not the rumour-spreaders who extracted from it two words and released them into the echo chamber of the internet. “Vaccines bad” were the words that stuck in the heads of the empty-headed.

People like that were Wakefield’s natural bedfellows. After he was ostracised by his own community he moved to America and was embraced by Donald Trump and every other outcast with an axe to grind. When Covid struck and vaccines became topical again, he became their high priest of hogwash.

Well, they’re now more topical than ever – thanks to an attention-deficit generation who believe whatever they think is ‘fashionable’ and who don’t remember the time when children couldn’t go swimming in summer for fear of catching polio and ending up paralysed. How long before they start demonising those vaccinations, too? Say what you like about artificial intelligence but it’s better than no intelligence at all.

We’re supposed to be living on the information superhighway but sometimes it seems we’re driving off a cliff.