Stupid parents who don't vaccinate their children should go to jail

So you didn’t get your child vaccinated? Fine. Your choice.

You’ll probably never see the people you killed and maimed.

You won’t meet the woman who never noticed a 3-day rubella rash, and then had a baby with a shrunken head, congenital cataracts, learning disabilities and diabetes. You won’t learn the name of the 7-year-old boy who went deaf with the mumps, and died waiting for a new pancreas.

You will never get to hear about the chemotherapy patients, HIV sufferers, and asthmatics whose immune systems couldn’t handle the measles virus, and who are reliant on you to help ensure 95% of humans are vaccinated in order to protect the rest.

But the names of every single one of those you have harmed should be branded on your soul. You killed them, as surely as if you dealt drugs, drove too fast or beat a child so badly its small body could not withstand it.

And just like every dealer, speeder and abuser, you knew what you were doing. The only difference is that you refused to look at your victims while you did it.

You’ve been told about Gareth Williams, who died of measles aged 25. You were warned about the 15 teenagers at Chichester High School who were diagnosed with the virus last year. You were sent leaflets, invited to appointments, and offered an alternative.

You had the chance to learn about Nadja Petrovic, who was born with an auto-immune condition that was no risk to her life, but meant she could not have the jab. She died while being treated in hospital because another patient had measles, and the two were put in the same room by over-stretched hospital staff.

Blood oozed from the toddler’s nose and mouth before she died of heart failure. Because here’s the really awful thing: there is no cure for measles. Nothing. All you can do is give fluids, try to bring the fever down, and hope any secondary infection isn’t resistant to antibiotics.

The best, and pretty much all, that you can do is to vaccinate people so the virus cannot find a host. If you don’t, measles lives to fight another day.

Here’s Nadja’s mum Dragana holding her daughter’s swollen, discoloured hand before she died, in a picture she made public to warn others of the risks.

Just this week, we saw photos of Alba Moss, who has just turned one. She was too young for the vaccination but caught the disease because of other, stupid, abusive, parents. She spent eight days in hospital critically-ill, and when her mum Jilly posted the pictures as a warning these stupid, abusive idiots claimed Alba was a doll, that it was made up, that Jilly was being paid by some unseen, pro-vaccination lizard Illuminati.

How the lizards benefit from healthy, happy children is unknown. But the anti-vax brigade seem to prefer them dead.

Vaccinations exist because before we had them, measles killed 2.6million people worldwide every year, mostly children under 5. They died in London and Manchester the same as they did in Tokyo and Timbuktu. The rate of mumps has dropped by 90% since vaccination began. There are still 100,000 children every year born with congenital rubella syndrome, because their mums were infected, but the bug is close to complete eradication in some places.

The combined MMR vaccines have saved millions of lives, worldwide. Those countries where the diseases remain a serious problem are most likely to be in the developing world, where there is poor education, a lack of health infrastructure, and vaccinations only happen if the UN or WHO can get to you.

Here in the UK, you have access to universal and higher education, a National Health Service free at the point of need, and a well-resourced GP covering every town and village. And 1 MILLION parents have decided to ignore all that.

Yesterday Tory Health Secretary Matt Half-cocked was asked what he’s going to do about the fact UNICEF says 500,000 children in the UK have not been vaccinated against measles. He blamed social media, that go-to Tory evasion-tactic for any minister who cannot express complicated thoughts.

And algorithms had a role in the spread of anti-vax propaganda – social media becomes a positive feedback loop for any mad thought people express, while unwelcome facts that don’t fit the fiction are scrubbed from their timelines.

But there’s more to it. Tory austerity has led to the closure of an estimated 1,000 children’s centres, community hubs where vaccines could both be explained and administered. Government health campaigns are under-funded and under-noticed, compared to previous ones. And there is so much instruction about what to do, what to eat and how to do things that the important stuff can get lost under an onslaught of less wine, more blueberries, high-fat, low-carb, fun-free and unbalanced balderdash from ‘experts’ who aren’t.

So boil this down to basics. A million parents are hurting their children, other people’s children, and adults, in this country and, thanks to international travel, around the world. Were they paedophiles, they’d be hunted down by Interpol. Were they county lines dealers, they’d be tracked by the National Crime Agency. If they were hurtling around the place in 12-wheel artics, the police would be laying out stingers to shred their tyres.

They’d be brought to justice.

Asked about banning unvaccinated children from schools, as has been tried in France and the US, the minister said: “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

In 1994 there were zero deaths in the UK from measles. A year later, disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield made bogus claims about the measles vaccine. In the years since, there have been a total of 23 deaths from measles. One was a baby, one a toddler, and the others were all aged 10 or older.

Over the same period another 75,224 Britons were infected, with massive health and social costs of dealing with the likely complications which can include pneumonia, meningitis, bronchitis, eye ulcers and permanent brain damage.

One dead baby would be enough for some, but 23 corpses and many millions of pounds of expense is probably enough to convince most voters that something needs to be done. Especially as it was easily, and cheaply, avoidable.

The real crime is people CHOSE to make this happen. People who claim to love their children, people who most likely have comfortable, middle-class lifestyles, and smugly feel that a pension, mortgage and SUV make their family immune to the sort of disease that slaughters poorer children indiscriminately if they are not helped.

It’s people who pay attention to ‘celebrity’ influencers, first-time parents who listen to other idiots at their private ante-natal class rather than their doctor, those who think ‘ooh, well, it’s a lot to give a tiny baby all at once and doesn’t the vaccine have metal in it, too?’

They don’t stop to ask themselves how, exactly, they’d continue to breathe in and out without iron, zinc, chromium and copper, or whether their blood system would work better or worse without the tiny amounts of gold in it.

Despite the high levels of stupid at work here, most of these people have access to the facts. Most know measles is bad, even if they are so far removed from any instance of it they’ve no idea how it terrified their grandmothers. But they have nevertheless made a conscious decision to do something which makes their children vulnerable to a deadly, awful disease, and invited it to happen to others.

In law, it is illegal not just to deal drugs, to speed or to assault, but also to accidentally kill as a result. It’s called manslaughter.

And that’s why every parent who refuses to vaccinate their child against any one of the host of childhood diseases that can kill them should be arrested, charged, and put on trial for child abuse. They are wilfully inflicting pain, they are negligently inviting risk, they are intentionally undertaking an act they know, with a second’s pause, is likely to hurt someone other than themselves.

Because most of these parents were vaccinated. Most of them were given access to everything their parents and grandparents  in many cases didn’t have, like further education, careers, and pensions. Their forebears knew what measles was, and shielded their descendants from it; these new, stupid parents are not afraid of a monster they have never seen.

They have never seen it in their families, in their newsfeeds, or in government information campaigns. Most of them have never seen an amputation without anaesthetic, either, but they still know it’s not a great idea. They’d know that not vaccinating children was bad, too, if it carried a prison sentence.

Those given the chance to improve the world, and who choose instead to maim and kill, should have their children, and their liberty, removed.