August is when phoney flammed-up stories fill the empty dog-days of summer. New Labour duty ministers used to prime the holiday-starved media with a daily grid of news, but now such conspicuous spin is over. And look what happens instead.
"Chaos Over 5-in-1 Baby Jab" screams the Daily Mail, delighted by a chance to repeat its weird and lethal campaign against vaccines. The Department of Health announces a minor improvement to the vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough and HIB, adding the previously orally administered polio vaccine. The polio vaccine will no longer be live, so is even safer. At the same time the tiny mercury content is being removed as it is no longer the right preservative for this combination. Taking mercury out also fulfils longstanding global obligations to remove mercury from everything possible because life-time exposure builds up and should be reduced. Never mind if the new vaccine is yet safer and simpler - the Mail was in full scare mode.
It would matter less if the BBC's Today programme hadn't rushed in to give this non-story legs - starting with another unscripted breathless early morning scare/chaos report. It ran on through their bulletins, only straightening itself out after a Department of Health press conference. The department was running to catch up after the story was leaked in advance of what should have been an orderly announcement today.
Would a minister like to comment on the breathtaking media irresponsibility over something so sensitive and important? The department said gloomily they just hoped the "story" would go away. Their experience over MMR was that every time vaccination was mentioned in the media - even when it was more evidence that it was safe - the immunisation rate dropped again as many parents only absorbed "controversy".
This week's minor announcement let the Mail rekindle its campaign claiming the MMR vaccine could cause autism and bowel disorders after one shaky study by a maverick doctor, unsubstantiated and refuted by virtually all experts. They featured another heart-rending story of a parent who blamed vaccination for her child's autism - the stories that sent out such shockwaves that the number of children immunised in Britain dropped dangerously.
This attempted scare over the new vaccine does not even have the benefit of any disputed study. Unfounded fears of "overloading the immune system" by combining polio into the other vaccines were raised by two parents groups (provoked by the Mail?) without one scientist backing it up. Not even one charlatan with a professional-sounding title could be found to support the "overloading" fears. But it was enough for the Mail - and the BBC - to talk of "scares" now endangering a second vital vaccination programme.
Let's hope this nonsense does not repeat the damage done to the MMR programme. It is impossible to estimate the number of children who will have died as a result of the MMR scare, so it will not be possible to show the grieving parents of babies killed by the Mail or the children with eye damage and other serious effects of measles. Anyone my age remembers how some 100 children a year died of it and one in 15 cases had serious complications, often with lifelong damage. I had measles severely as a child, with weeks of high fever in a blackout room to protect the eyes. Four hundred and sixty eight thousand fewer children were immunised due to the anti-MMR campaign, the loss of community immunity putting vulnerable people at risk.
But the "community immunity" idea smacks of some kind of socialist plot against the individual in the Mail mindset. The paper rarely justifies itself, on the never-apologise-never-explain principle, but here's an anonymous quote from a Mail spokesperson: "It is not our job to promote group immunity. If some of our readers' kids might be affected as individuals - even if that is a remote chance - then we have to report it and will continue to do so." Since they have sales of 2m and many more readers, clearly the concept of community immunity for all their readers has simply passed them by. The Mail spokesman added: "Our readers are adults and they can decide for themselves how scared they ought to be." The executive producer of Sky News went one better: "The audience appears to want to be scared."
The above quotes come from a brilliant critique of the media's reporting of health issues, Health in the News: Risk, Reporting and Media Influence, by the King's Fund, the leading health thinktank. It shows that health coverage is in direct inverse proportion to real risk. What kills most people gets least coverage (and the BBC scored worst). The report shows how politicians have often been forced to change policy priorities and health spending according to what the media highlights, regardless of public good or even public opinion.
Along with Anna Coote and Jessica Allen, the third author of the report is Roger Harrabin, distinguished Today correspondent, which adds impact to the harsh criticism of the BBC in the analysis of its coverage and the failure of its public service remit. Studying the pathology of the MMR story, the report quotes the editor of the 10 O'Clock News admitting that stories running hard in the press, and especially in the Mail, were "irresistible". He said the controversy over MMR would continue across the media as long as the Mail kept running with the story. If issues were debated in widely read papers, he was obliged to run them. He admitted they had "probably" over-reported MMR, but said that he was governed by "public debate".
A feeding frenzy really gets going when the BBC buys into it: a newspaper starts a scare, the government or chief medical officer is goaded into responding, the paper gets a publicity-hungry MP to ask questions and, hey presto, it's a "public debate". Isn't it exactly at such times that the value of the BBC is tested? But often it is swept along, letting ignorant Mail-obsessed blokey presenters fan the flames, instead of leaving it to the specialists to knock lies and scares on the head.
I laughed to see that at the end of the King's Fund report were the BBC's draft guidelines on risk, drawn up after one of their interminable seminars so familiar to those of us who have worked within, where very highly paid officials lay out the best possible rules to help the public assess the real risks of scares. But the question for the BBC's new director of news is why the high-flown BBC guidelines translate into the casual, breezy Mail-influenced throwaway lines from under-briefed presenters in programmes edited and staffed by those who too easily forget the difference between the Mail and the BBC.
The BBC's best reason for charter renewal is that it eschews racy news and takes the high ground to try to counter-balance Britain's abysmal press. It has to be trusted to tell the facts as best it can, even if that's duller, more pompous and more complicated: the truth often is.
