Absolutely. It is grossly irresponsible and, I am afraid, profoundly and disturbingly misleading, and even ignorant, to go around doing that. It ends up stoking public paranoia and fear, and leads to the unnecessary loss of life. From the beginning, the story of immunisation—and, indeed, the story of international development—has often been about challenging public perceptions and irrational fears, and following through. There are reasons for that. The heart of what immunisation is carries within it the seeds of that challenge. The basic idea of immunisation is, of course, to make somebody sick to make them better. From the very beginning, that has involved not only challenging public fears, but something that Governments find quite difficult: taking risks; and working, genuinely and collaboratively, internationally.
Although we tend to pat ourselves on the back a great deal in this country, immunisation was, of course, not a European discovery at all. It was a Chinese discovery of the early 16th century. Chinese public health officials, or their 16th century equivalents, went into villages and sneezed into people’s mouths, which rapidly reduced the mortality rate by tenfold or twentyfold. The normal mortality rate for smallpox was 20% to 30%, but remember that that reduced mortality rate under the new technique was still between 0.5% and 2%, so the procedure was very risky. Moving on with my international point, this immunisation practice arrived in Britain in about 1700.