I had been feeling tired and dizzy for several weeks. My concentration was flagging by mid-afternoon every day, and I was experiencing persistent rheumatic pain in most of my major joints. My GP didn’t seem too worried, but booked me in for a blood test in a week’s time and told me to take it easy.
It was around the same time, in 2018, that measles cases across Europe hit a 20-year high. The sharp rise, blamed by the World Health Organization (WHO) on vaccine hesitancy, was heralded by the rapid resurgence of the ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement. Today, the threat anti-vaxxers pose to public health is even more pressing: just this month, measles outbreaks have been reported in areas of Greece, Italy, France, Canada, Ireland, the USA and Japan; the WHO ranks vaccine hesitancy among the top ten threats to public health in 2019.
It is no coincidence that the smiling presence of Andrew Wakefield – a struck-off British doctor, notable for widely discredited research linking the MMR vaccine to autism – had re-entered public consciousness in 2017 after being spotted at one of President Donald Trump’s inauguration balls. In the subsequent months, the British press had covered with interest – and often rising alarm – his exploits in America.
But none of this was on my mind when, attending the surgery for my blood test, I was offered a free flu vaccination. Nor when I was immediately offered another free vaccine, against pneumonia. Indeed, it rather gave me pause when the friendly medical assistant ran through a remarkable litany of awful things that could happen to mild asthmatics – like me – who contracted pneumonia, including the possibility of ending up in a coma. So I consented. Like the majority of British people, I am a firm believer in the public health benefits of vaccination.
I then headed into work, where I felt completely fine for a couple of hours. Then I lost most of the movement in my left arm. I started to feel alternately boiling hot and freezing. My view of the office started to spin like a slot machine. I held on to the edge of my desk with my good arm, to avoid falling out of my seat.
The next day, I was in agony. I went to A&E, expecting to be given a prescription for codeine and summarily dismissed. Instead, as my arm had swelled to almost the size of my thigh, I was admitted as an inpatient.
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