Vaccination campaign suffering from Blair's reticence

By BRONWYN SELL in LONDON

British MPs are refusing to use babies to promote their political campaigns - at least not their own babies. And people are suspicious.

As a measles outbreak threatens, Prime Minister Tony Blair is urging British parents to use the triple MMR (measles, mumps rubella) vaccine on their children.

However, for privacy reasons he refuses to confirm whether he's had his 20-month-old son, Leo, vaccinated. And the MMR vaccination campaign, already hurt by bad press and studies linking it to autism, is suffering from his silence.

Until quite recently, politicians' children would have been the first to be dragged into the spotlight to make a political point for their parents.

But a new era of jealous privacy has enveloped Westminster. Blair and his ministers refuse to reveal even the most mundane details about their children, and the public trusts their silence as much as it trusted their predecessors' blatant publicity.

The confusion is creating inaction. The number of parents getting their toddlers vaccinated is dropping, at a time health authorities are increasingly concerned about the risk of a measles epidemic.

To prevent epidemics, 95 per cent of the population needs to be covered by inoculation. The proportion now covered by MMR has fallen from more than 90 per cent to 82 per cent and is as low as 65 per cent in some parts of London.

Blair's refusal to disclose has compounded public doubt over a vaccine which is claimed to cause autism and other conditions. One thousand families are preparing to go to court to try to hold the triple vaccine manufacturers responsible for their children's ill-health.

Their claims were legitimised in a widely criticised report by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, who suggested in 1998 there was a link between MMR, inflammatory bowel disease and autism.

Other parents are calling for Blair to come clean about Leo, to give them some cause for confidence.

Guardian commentator and father-of-three Andrew Rawnsley wrote that he was prepared to accept the opinion of the majority of the world's scientists, who declare MMR to be safe. "The outbreak of measles in south London is barely a mile away from where we live. For me, the balance of risks weighs in favour of MMR.



"While I have a lot of sympathy with the Blairs' desire to protect the privacy of their children, the Prime Minister has too often invoked 'the kids' in his rhetoric and too frequently used their images to enhance himself.

"He cannot then turn round and say Leo's treatment is out of bounds in the case of this controversy.

"The result has been to further inflame this crisis. Not because parents will necessarily follow the Blairs' example, but because they will not trust the Government's advice while its leader is furtive about his own child.

"My own guess is that Baby Blair did have the jab recently, but only after much agonising by his parents. There is some history of autism on Cherie's side of the family. Instead of being so slippery about it, Blair could have shared his own anguish about the decision. That would have made him a more credible salesman of the Government's advice."

Blair's critics in opposition and in the media are criticising him for putting the privacy of his child before the health of many thousands of toddlers, when he could restore calm in one media statement.

His statements are getting closer to confirming that he has had Leo done although the general opinion is that he delayed the vaccination for a few months. There was also speculation he had strayed away from MMR in favour of separate vaccinations for each disease.

Blair last week gave his strongest hint that Leo had received the jab. "I am not going to go into details about our children, but ... a lot of what appeared in the papers about us not wanting to have this, or having three separate vaccinations, is complete nonsense." He said he would never advocate something he did not think was safe for his children.

He rejected the suggestion that confirming Leo had been vaccinated would draw a line under the matter. "Would it? I doubt it. We would then have been asked all the follow-up questions across the whole range of campaigns and pieces of advice that the Government gives."

The Government is said to be asking television networks to donate airtime for advertising campaigns to spread the vaccination message - which would be the biggest health campaign since safe sex messages were broadcast during the mid-1980s Aids crisis.