The Covid & MMR Vaccines: Battling The Tidal Waves of Conspiracy Theories

And the role of the rich and famous in society.

Hakan Nural via Unsplash

Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Over the course of his premiership, he became the very first leader to have a legitimate child in office for 150 years. This was long before David Cameron and Boris Johnson came along and acted accordingly.

And this child, Leo Blair, was for a while, the source of great controversy.

Why?

The MMR vaccine.

The MMR vaccine is a vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella. The first shot is usually to children at 9 months and the second, from around the ages of 15 months to 9 years of age.

Back then, the MMR vaccine was the source of conspiracy theories. According to the now discredited Dr. Andrew Wakefield, there was a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, based on an experiment conducted on a small number of children.

It didn’t matter that Wakefield acted unethically and cut too many corners in arriving at the conclusion of his test, the general public bought his lies wholeheartedly.

And this inevitably led to great numbers of people choosing not to vaccinate their children and those at the very top of public life, didn’t exactly seem immune to the pernicious conspiracy theories, being bandied about, hence the Blair controversy.

Tony Blair, for the longest time, chose not to field any questions as to whether his son, Leo, had received the MMR vaccine. Had he and his wife spoken up to say that they had indeed vaccinated their young son and the science wasn’t false, people would have listened, disregarded the lies and gone ahead to do the right thing for their children.

But Britain’s former prime minister wasn’t alone in this madness.

Robert De Niro, the legendary two time Academy award winning actor, it seemed, wasn’t above conspiracies either. At an interview conducted years ago at the Today breakfast show, De Niro said the following:

As a parent of a child who has autism, I’m concerned, And I want to know the truth. And I’m not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines.