Unforgiveable MMR scaremongering by the Mail

The Daily Mail was at the forefront of the media scaremongering in the late 1990’s when Andrew Wakefeild set back the MMR vaccination in the UK by a decade with his false and baseless claims that the MMR jab could lead to autism in children, so when I saw this headline on their online site, I was immediately sceptical:

Simply by reading that headline, you get the impression that the girl died of mumps after having the MMR vaccination. Pretty shocking if true. Except it’s not.

The first sentence from the same article:

A four-year-old girl died of a mystery illness after being wrongly diagnosed as having mumps.

So she didn’t die from mumps. Making the headline a downright lie.

This kind of scaremongering perpetuated by the Mail to generate website hits or sales is not only dishonest, but cruel. You only have to look at the comments to see that some people have taken the headline at face value:

This parent will not allow her son to have the MMR jab, presumably because of this story in the Mail. Now this obviously displays an astoundingly stupid mindset, but as The Angry Mob points out, there are some spectacular fuckwits that read the Daily Mail. Surely if the paper had a shred of decency left in it, it would not publish stories like this which wrongly inflame people’s opinion against a harmless and life-saving vaccination?

But once again, common decency has been shoved into the corner in favour of scaremongering, sales and the Mail’s own twisted agenda. I sincerely hope that the children of the parents who choose not to have the vaccine because of this story are fine and never catch the diseases that can be prevented by the MMR jab, but if the they do fall ill, then their blood is on the Mail’s hands as far as I am concerned.