‘If he believed in something, he would have gone to the ends of the earth to go on believing.’ (from an interview with Wakefield’s mother, pg. 370)
‘Can one person change the world? Ask Andrew Wakefield.’
(extract from an editorial in The New Indian Express, pg. 5)
When I started primary school in a class of 30 there were four of my companions who had callipers and two of them were given chunkier pencils. When my GP gave me a sugar lump on which he had put some liquid, neither he nor my mum told me it was to stop getting polio and it was years later I put the callipers and the sugar lump together.
I trusted my GP because he was gentle when he looked in my ears and in the early sixties I cannot remember moaning too much when, with my mum, I stood in a long queue extending no less than 8 detached houses up the street, waiting to see my GP standing with his sleeves rolled up at the door to his one-roomed surgery. He scratched my arm in front of a flickering blue flame, which would have been scary if it was not him standing there. It was only in my A-level days that I understood how Jenner had discovered smallpox vaccine which was used for the last time in West-Yorkshire during a localised outbreak.
In my junior doctor days I covered the infectious diseases wards when doing evenings and nights and looked after wards of hot children with coughs and heavily glazed eyes. In my first years as a GP I was tasked to raise the childhood immunisation from ‘What? How do you mean?’ to the 94% which we — the staff, the health visitors and myself — achieved.
My two children were fully immunised and I ensured they got the second MMR when …