The UK Health Security Agency is sufficiently concerned about the growing number of measles cases in the West Midlands that it declared a ‘national incident’ last week. According to official figures, there have been 216 confirmed and 103 probable measles cases in the region since last October. The cause? The uptake of the MMR vaccine is at its lowest level in more than a decade, according to Dame Jenny Harries, CEO of the UKHSA.

For some, this is proof of the ‘harm’ that anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists can do if greater efforts aren’t made to silence them. A leading article in the Times blamed the outbreak on ‘disease disinformation’, accusing activists of waging ‘irresponsible and immoral campaigns’. That echoed the findings of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which published a report in 2021 urging social media organisations to deplatform the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ – 12 individuals and their organisations responsible for 65 per cent of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter. The centre cited ‘researchers’ who ‘are increasingly connecting misinformation disseminated via social media to increased vaccine hesitancy’.

Is it any wonder some parents are reluctant for their children to have the MMR vaccine, given how often they’ve been lied to?

As a free speech advocate, I’m sceptical about this diagnosis. The main spreaders of health-related ‘misinformation’ over the past four years or so have not been vaccine sceptics, but official organisations like the World Health Organisation which, in the early phase of the pandemic, exaggerated the risk of Covid-19, particularly to children, leading to unnecessary school closures. We now know that the two-metre social distancing rule had no scientific basis, and the evidence underlying mask mandates is threadbare at best. We also have good reason to believe the cost of lockdown far outweighed the benefit. The example of Sweden, which never imposed a national lockdown, suggests there were very few benefits at all.

Surely it is this catalogue of errors, which caused incalculable social and economic harm, that has eroded people’s trust in the public health establishment, not the anti-vaxxers? Is it any wonder some parents are reluctant for their children to have the MMR, given how often they’ve been lied to about the benefits of this or that health measure over the past four years? I daresay a few of them can recall the government applying pressure on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) to change its mind about recommending in December 2021 that five- to 11-year-olds shouldn’t be given the Covid jab.

I’m not suggesting that any of this is a good reason for not vaccinating your child against measles, mumps and rubella. Just because public health panjandrums like Jenny Harries dished out some poor advice about masks during the pandemic doesn’t mean she’s wrong about the MMR: Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 article in the Lancet linking it to autism has been thoroughly debunked. I’m just pointing out that the current measles outbreak isn’t a knockdown argument for censoring vaccine sceptics.

A report by the Royal Society in 2022 entitled ‘The Online Information Environment: Understanding how the internet shapes people’s engagement with scientific information’ recommended against ‘content removal’ as a strategy for combating misinformation. The authors made five arguments: first, there’s no evidence that removing scientific misinformation from platforms like Facebook and Twitter is an effective way of discrediting it; second, establishing a causal link between online misinformation and offline harm is extremely difficult; third, censoring health-related misinformation could drive that content into hidden corners of the internet where it’s less likely to be challenged; fourth, deciding what is and is not scientific misinformation is not always possible, particularly where there’s no scientific consensus; and fifth, removing content rather than rebutting it may exacerbate mistrust and be exploited to promote false narratives.

As if to prove the point, there was a crackdown on the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ by the big social media platforms in 2022, yet vaccine hesitancy has grown. According to the WHO, there was a 30-fold increase in measles cases across Europe last year. In truth, the ebb and flow of vaccine scepticism on the internet over the past few years probably hasn’t been a major factor in the measles outbreak. A more probable cause is the conversion of the NHS into a Covid-only service from March 2020 to July 2021, meaning lots of parents failed to get their kids jabbed. As with other recent health crises, the ‘national incident’ is a consequence of the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic.