By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

London Mayor Ken Livingstone recently announced that he would not allow his child to have the MMR vaccine and advised parents not to do so either. Livingstone based his recommendations on the fact that infants are fragile and money is not an issue in health care provision.

Livingstone's deep analysis of the safety of the vaccine went something like this,

It seems to me that a child of those months, just 14 months is incredibly vulnerable. I remember having all these jabs separately -- often you had quite a severe reaction. Why whack them all into a child at the same time?

Great Britain could probably save a lot of time and money by ditching medical research into vaccine safety and efficacy and instead simply relying on Livingstone's impressions and recollections of his own childhood.

Livingstone also claimed that the MMR was done largely for monetary reasons saying,

It's a question of huge savings of time and money and in no way would I inflict on a child that risk.

This is the dumbest thing anyone has yet said about the MMR vaccine. In case Livingstone has not noticed, Great Britain's National Health System is already among the worst in Europe and is severely constrained by funding problems. For Livingstone to pretend that increasing the cost of vaccination is a trivial matter is absurd. Does Livingstone himself plan to pay the extra expense?

Source:

London mayor warns against MMR. The BBC, July 2, 2002.

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