A mother whose child died aged six from a brain inflammation caused by measles hopes sharing her story will encourage parents to “vaccinate more”.
It comes as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warned of measles outbreaks in parts of London.
Gemma Larkman-Jones wants more parents to consider having their children vaccinated sooner.
…
Prof Dame Jenny Harries, UKHSA chief executive, warned that measles is spreading among unvaccinated communities, and added that a “national call to action” is needed across the country.
Vaccination rates across the UK have been dropping, but there are particular concerns in parts of the capital as well as in some areas of the West Midlands.
Remember when humanity solved this issue and children didn’t have to die? Those were good times.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A mother whose child died aged six from a brain inflammation caused by measles hopes sharing her story will encourage parents to “vaccinate more”.
It comes as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warned of measles outbreaks in parts of London.
Her son, Samuel, developed a rare form of brain inflammation after catching measles, and died in 2019.
“I honestly think that if people knew that this was a possibility they would vaccinate more,” Ms Larkman-Jones, 45, of Brixton, south London, told the PA Media news agency.
Prof Dame Jenny Harries, UKHSA chief executive, warned that measles is spreading among unvaccinated communities, and added that a “national call to action” is needed across the country.
In February 2019 Samuel was transferred to St Thomas’ Hospital where a lumbar puncture and an MRI test found he had the neurological disorder subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
The original article contains 393 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“Samuel didn’t need to die and that’s the guilt I carry every day with me,” she said.
It was the anti-vaxxers fault, not hers. I hope one day she’s able to accept that.
I mean, you can move around the blame all you want, it’s more important to work on fixing the problem.
For example:
It’s not the anti-vaxxers’ fault, it’s the schools’ fault for not educating them well about vaccines and immunity
-> it’s not the schools’ fault, it’s the government’s fault for not funding the educational sector enough
-> it’s not the government’s fault, it’s x party’s fault for cutting taxes
-> it’s not x party’s fault, it’s the voters’ fault for voting them in to the government
etc etc.
She was an anti-vaxxer. She made choices that led to her son’s death.
The article doesn’t make that clear, so I don’t want to accuse her unfairly.
I don’t think it will change a lot of peoples minds. For most people, truth is social and they look to their in-group more than raw facts. Group membership is really important to the brain, and it reacts to threats to group membership similarly to how it reacts to a physical threat.
Related to the above, frankly a lot of people are too cowardly and fragile to admit fault. You’ve probably seen low stakes versions of this in real life. You’re arguing with someone about what year a movie came out. You say it was 1990, they say 1989. You look it up and find it was in fact released March, 1990. Instead of them saying “Shit, you got me,” they’ll pull some bullshit like “Oh but march is still basically the previous year so i’m still basically right”. Cowards. It doesn’t matter much when it’s about trivia, but when it’s about shit like vaccines people die.
“I honestly think that if people knew that this was a possibility they would vaccinate more,”
There isn’t a doctor on Earth who doesn’t tell mothers not to vaccinate their children. Look at this woman’s face. You know she shared every single anti-vax post since 2020.
She has to live with that every day of her life and is now doing what she can to save others that trauma, despite knowing that there will be dickheads who just want to pile on anyway. Have some humanity.
“Samuel didn’t need to die and that’s the guilt I carry every day with me,” she said.
Look at this woman’s face. You know she shared every single anti-vax post since 2020.
You got all that from her physical appearance, huh? I actually agree with your stance on vaccines, but fuck you anyway and fuck the people who upvoted this
…she said he had been put on a delayed vaccination programme.
I’m not familiar with this. Can any English readers enlighten me? Why was it delayed?
Means fuck around and found out.
The way it’s written implies the kid was placed in some sort of DHS “program” (?) maybe a scheduling thing (?), not that the mother was an anti-vax idiot, although it’s entirely possible she was. Either way the poor kid died of a preventable disease. Terrible.
Usually it means the parents opted for this. Not that anyone deserved this, I’m just clarifying what it likely means.
The ‘soft’ antivax stance is getting vaccinated for more than one thing at a time it too hard on young bodies.
It’s bullshit on the spectrum of antivax.
It actually has some interesting history as this was the claim of Andrew Wakefield, one of the guys who threw gas on the antivax fire linking MMR to autism (he had a patent on a Measles vaccine, separate from the MMR). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
So it does sound like something she chose because…autism or whatever else these types pull out of their ass. It’s heartbreaking for those kids
At least she is facing reality and trying to warn others. It seems to me to be more common to double down and blame any other cockamamie idea rather than accept that she made the wrong choice.
if ooonly someone had told her… are you kidding me.
Sometimes I think about how years ago parents would lie over their children’s beds crying. Praying for a miracle because that is all that can save their child now is the work of God. They have see this before, heard the stories. Seen the other children die just recently. They know the pain, they know what is coming. They have done all they can. They sent for the doctor who said he won’t be coming back as he has other patients to attend to, ones that might live. Yes they do what they can but it is all for nothing. They burry their child and go back home.
They sit there unable to cry anymore, the silence is broken from a cough in the younger childs room. They then pray to God that this is just a cold. God doesn’t listen, God doesn’t bring miracles. But man does. One day the work of God comes in the hands of the many and changes the suffering forever.
Sometimes I wonder what those people would say to us. I bet they would hate us for not taking something they would give their lives for.
Some of us here are old enough to remember when everyone knew someone who had had polio, or had had it themselves. Our parents lined us up around the block for both the Salk and Sabin vaccines, even knowing that for some of these recipients, it would miss, or worse, cause harm. We all did it anyway. Because we all knew what the alternative was. When I was five, the smallpox vax almost took me out – but I never heard a word of regret, or uttered one myself, because the reality of a real smallpox infection is magnitudes worse.
For a few years, when Salk or Sabin were spotted in public, parents would literally hug their feet. This is not an exaggeration. They were literally considered human saints, and their vaccines literal miracles. Before the polio vaccine, anyone – especially the healthiest of the young, who should have been most immune to any illness – could feel sick in the morning and be paralyzed or dead by nightfall. If you lived, you often walked with a limp or a cane, and that doesn’t account for post-polio complications: you could “survive” polio and still have it kill you decades later. Older folks are STILL dying of post-polio complications today, in the same way that people who survived “the Spanish flu” in 1918-1921 succumbed to neurological illnesses decades later.
I don’t believe in the god part of it, but you can’t fault them for grasping for those straws. Because for all of human history until the last century or so, prayers were all you had left when the medicines ran out, and even getting anything effective to start with, including a diagnosis, was sketchy as hell. Everything from “bad air” (miasma) to “imbalanced humours” was considered valid disease theory.
We are SO much more privileged now than we realize. And the realities we don’t care to see are willingly hidden from us by the curators of the media we consume. Back then, news was deadly serious, almost sacred, and very highly valued. People didn’t fuck with it. Walter Cronkite was possibly the most trusted man in the United States, and everyone knew who Edward R. Murrow was long after he died in 1965. But today, it doesn’t even make a pretense at being news: it’s entertainment, even when it’s news. So who is going to show us the realities no one like to see and advertisers won’t pay to support?
So I already know what your fictional parents would say. I don’t have to guess, because polio survivors were all around me when I was a kid. And it wasn’t just vaccines; antibiotics did not really become widespread until after WWII in the US. Many, many people had living memories of the TB sanatoriums, and friends they’d had that died far too young, and how in many wars illness killed more soldiers on all sides than bullets ever did. Gene Tierney, a movie actress, was pregnant and got German measles from a fan on a USO tour; because of it her daughter was born profoundly disabled and lived most of her long life institutionalized. Scarlet fever, measles, all these diseases were still in living memory, along with their profound costs and legacies of pain.
So people did not dick around with illness, in the same way most of us don’t dick around with gravity tests off tall buildings, because it was far too often either outright deadly, or came with too many consequences to take chances with.
People did what they had to do to avoid getting sick, it was part of being a good citizen, and if you didn’t do it you were an embarrassment and a fool. It wasn’t just you doing it for yourself, it was literally what you owed to your community as a human being.
Had anyone said the anti-vax, anti-science shit some are saying today, they’d have become an instant pariah and outcast, and widely seen as the threat to the common good that they are.
