Blanket assurance on MMR 'a mistake'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 15/05/2002)
 

The blanket reassurances on the MMR vaccine were attacked yesterday by a leading scientist who said they risked further undermining the confidence of parents.

The warning by Lord May will put pressure on the Government to quantify the risk posed by the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine - even though it is thought to be tiny - rather than write it off completely.

He said the Department of Health had stated that the vaccine was utterly safe, but it was not reassuring to tell people that you knew everything when they could see there was a controversy.

Current research was not good enough to rule out all risk, though Lord May stressed that he believed the risk was minute, of the order of one in 100,000.

He said there should be a frank admission of areas of uncertainty so these small risks could be balanced against the much larger risks posed by poor vaccine uptake and a resulting epidemic of measles.

"You either run a very tiny risk or you have an epidemic that kills people."

There might also be a public backlash if firmer evidence of adverse effects emerged, no matter how tiny.

Lord May, president of the Royal Society and former chief scientist to the Prime Minister, was speaking at a London seminar on the Challenges of the Future.

He contrasted the health department's stance with the openness of the Food Standard Agency in discussing the risk that BSE had passed to lamb, which remained unknown because of flawed experiments that muddled up sheep and cow brains.

Because the agency presented the public with the uncertainties, rather than a blanket reassurance, there had been relatively little unease about BSE in lamb.

But had the agency said that there was nothing to worry about, and the chairman Sir John Krebs had fed his children lamb-burgers, "it would have provoked such echoes of the mistakes made previously with BSE that there would have been a huge fuss".

	5 May 2002: MPs 'lose credibility in debate over MMR'
	29 March 2002: Many parents still unwilling for babies to get MMR jabs
	14 February 2002: More measles cases in London and North East
	8 February 2002: Single jab 'plays Russian roulette with children'

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