I was born in Uganda in 1950, and a year and a half later I slipped out of bed one day and I collapsed on the floor. My parents immediately thought, “Oh, it’s polio”. It would be hard to imagine what a world without vaccines would be like. It would really be quite horrible. There would be outbreaks of disease regularly, all over the world. The true deep impact, and the global impact, of vaccines just can’t be overestimated. My grandmother, she used to tell a story about when they would hear the bells on a hearse going down the high street, a funeral. She said as children they would rush to their nursery window to see if there were white ribbons on the horses which meant it was a child funeral, and they happened several times a week. It typically affected children. One of the names for polio was infantile paralysis. It’s quite difficult to imagine a world without vaccines. Life expectancy would be a lot lower. People would have to lock themselves away and only come out again when it was safe. And ironically, there would be such a demand to do something that vaccines would inevitably emerge. Vaccines are likely the most important public health intervention of the last 100 years. They’ve saved over a billion lives. With the roll out of vaccines we have seen a massive reduction in child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. I am born in the Gambia and growing up there I lost a brother to measles. To lose somebody at a very premature age from a disease preventable by vaccines is absolutely devastating. Vaccines can prevent cancer and there are two cancer vaccines. With the roll out of the current malaria vaccine we are expecting to see a reduction of 40% of malaria deaths. You could bring a vaccine to people but will they take it? Anti-vaccination fears have been around for over a century. We know from the 1850s, when Jenner first developed smallpox vaccine there were actually quite a few protests. A lot of it was about civil rights and libertarian values. There were arguments saying that it was poisonous, that children who received a smallpox vaccine would develop bovine or cow-like traits. A lot of it was just a genuine knowledge void that a lot of people had in the 1850s that they still have today. On the one hand we have the really hardcore anti-vaccination groups, but a lot of people are actually in the middle, and I think what we need to do is just engage with people where they are and where they are talking and not discount their real concerns. People want to understand things, they want to be confident, they might be afraid of needles. We have to understand their context and where they’re coming from and what are their past experiences with health and vaccines. We have to ensure that people understand it and they will take it. A world without vaccines, it would be a matter of economic status where the children of the wealthy will have access to healthcare will be surviving. Vaccines are the only public health intervention that can bring equality. So women don’t need to have five, 10 children just to see three of them grow to old age. This isn’t about just individual rights, when you take a vaccine it’s protecting yourself, it’s protecting your family, and it’s protecting your community. It’s not just a personal choice, it’s a moral choice as well that affects other people. It’s impossible to emphasise how important vaccines are. And the reason that we don’t often realise that they’re important is that we’ve eradicated many of these diseases. The idea that vaccines could be a victim of their own success, it’s about taking things for granted, isn’t it? And not looking behind what the privileges we have in the modern world are, and what makes it the modern world, and makes it a safe place for most of us to be, and vaccines are absolutely at the heart of that. They’re fundamental.
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