The Headlines

‘I didn’t speak to a single journalist who actually read the paper—not one.’

Justin Lewis is Professor of Communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism. In 2003, along with Tammy Speers, he published a comprehensive review of media coverage of MMR in the period between January and September 2002. Vaccine hesitancy started immediately after the 1998 press conference, and continued well into the 2010s, but in this particular year they found 561 media reports on MMR. 69 percent of these mentioned a potential link between vaccines, autism, and/or bowel disease. Only 37 percent featured the large body of evidence that the vaccine was safe.

‘It was hearsay,’ Lewis tells me over Zoom. ‘One newspaper reported it, so another one did. It was pack journalism at its worst.’

Over half of the media coverage identified came between 28 January and 28 February. Analysis of a few stories published in this period reveals an ‘us vs. the experts’ mentality, along with the politicising and sensationalising of medical matters.

On 2 February, the Mail on Sunday published a story headlined ‘85% want single jabs: public shun controversial MMR triple vaccine as Prime Minister still refuses to come clean’, and quotes a celebrity parent saying she refused to give her son the jab after her daughter reacted badly to it.

Then, on 17 February, the same paper followed up with the headline ‘The government has finally caved in to pressure over MMR and agreed to begin talks with the doctor who first raised concerns about the controversial triple vaccine’. In the article, Wakefield is quoted extensively. ‘You cannot fail to be aware of the unexplained and dramatic increase in autism in countries which administer the MMR vaccine,’ he says.

The sentiment in the Daily Mail was the same. On 6 February 2002, it ran a front-page story headlined ‘New alert on MMR jab’. Three days before, via the MailOnline, it had reported Wakefield’s view that ‘trials of the vaccine were too small and did not follow children up for a long enough period to gauge potential problems,’ under the headline ‘MMR vaccine side-effects ‘not fully tested’’.

Things were much the same at the Sun. On the front page on 5 February, text read ‘THE SUN SAYS: Give us a choice on MMR jab. Our readers’ kids are at risk. Our readers simply have NO choice. Our readers are being treated like second class citizens’. In a double-page spread inside, the paper referred to ‘the great MMR debate’ and spoke of how ‘the arrogant people who run the NHS are refusing Sun readers a vital choice’. It quotes a mother talking about her guilt for letting her son get injected.

The next day, its headlines announced that ‘Mums are ‘winning MMR war’: fear of disease could lead to 3-in-1 u-turn’, and again quoted anecdotes from parents of schoolchildren at length, plus an opinion piece entitled ‘Why my child won’t have jab’. The day after that, headlines included ‘Our son had MMR shot… Then the lights went out’, and ‘I can’t risk it again’. ‘Emily badly needs her jab,’ the author of the second article wrote, ‘but we wouldn’t let her have the triple jab if it was the last thing in the world’.

Changing Minds

The concerns of parents at the time—and their frustration at becoming anxious despite the weight of scientific evidence—have been immortalised on Mumsnet. ‘The more I look into it, the more confused I am’ writes one in a 24 June 2002 post. ‘And I’m annoyed with myself for falling into the media trap.’ ‘Both my [sons] have had the mmr injections but they got them before the media got on the case’, writes another on 25 July 2002. ‘My youngest is now 4 and almost due his booster, my eldest is autistic but not due the injection (IMO), but I am now left facing the scary decision of whether to give no.2 his booster.’

This anxiety translated into a real drop in vaccine uptake, from 92 percent in 1995-6 to 80 percent in 2003-4. It’s possible, some argue, to trace direct links in certain places. This study, for example, looks at the South Wales Evening Post’s ‘fight for facts’ campaign and the subsequent 13.6 percent decline in uptake in its circulation area. In 2012-13, there was a measles epidemic in the area, largely amongst children who had not been vaccinated as infants. Outbreaks also occurred around that time on Merseyside and in Greater Manchester.

Some parents looking back now feel profound regret. For others, the scepticism has proved hard to shake—with Covid-19 forcing difficult but necessary decisions.

AB, as they wish to be known, is the child of one such parent. They tell me: ‘[My mum] had heard about the outcry and MMR jabs being potentially tied to autism at the time, by which point I had already had two jabs. She didn’t want me to develop autism, so I didn’t get my last MMR vaccine.

‘To my knowledge she’s only changed her mind recently,’ they continue. ‘It wasn’t until I was older and me, her, and my stepdad—who has a science background—had a discussion about how the study had been disproven. She’s fully vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19 now, thankfully.’

There are also parents who have become more entrenched in anti-vaccine opinions and communities, or to this day maintain that the MMR jab gave their children autism.

After MMR

Putting aside for a moment the implication that the risk of death is preferable to the risk of developing autism, the coverage might have been comprehensible, particularly given the recent loss of public health confidence over the response to BSE, if the MMR evidence was split. But it wasn’t.

‘Even in quite responsible news outlets, a little like the coverage of climate change at the time, there was this idea that if there was dissenting view, in order to be balanced in your coverage, you give that about the same amount of coverage as 99.9 percent of scientists,’ Lewis says. ‘In this particular case, the way the balance would happen—which was unfortunate—was that you would get a lot of quite dry scientists giving you data. And then you’d get a very sympathetic young, married couple saying something like, “Well, our son was fine until he had the MMR and then he developed this.” That seemed so much more compelling and so much more human.’

The 99-1 percent evidence split suggests a complex agenda, and points to deeper problems with how the press covers science, and sensationalism’s influence on the development of the ‘truth’. More insidious was the political agenda of some of the most sceptical papers. Tony Blair’s refusal to say whether his son Leo had had his vaccination was a particularly hot moment in what was overall a convenient tale of a maverick standing up to the nanny state: many of the culprit papers, says Lewis, are ‘actually ideologically driven outlets. We give them way too much credit for being journalistic outlets.’

This was not the rule across the board. The BBC, for example, played a part in spreading misinformation by dint of its ‘balance of views’ principle, while other right-wing tabloids like the News of the World were vocal in their support for jabs. But the problem was pronounced across right-wing lines: the Sun and Mail were serious culprits, alongside the Telegraph and the Daily Express.

This balance goes some way in clarifying the change in tune over Covid jabs. ‘Given this was a right-wing government introducing [the Covid jabs], and absolutely putting faith in them, there was less space to develop that discourse,’ Lewis says. He adds: ‘[The papers] realised it was their only way out of lockdown, which they hated.’

Admitting wrongdoing, as the Mail did in 2019 when it launched a pro-MMR campaign, is not easy, and must be welcomed. But it’s not yet clear that the attitude that overegged one dodgy study and threw public health off kilter for years to come has fully dissipated. These problems are ultimately far bigger than one story—and remain in spirit today.