[DanaC]

*Nods* That's my understanding of how it works over here as well Jinx.

With my eldest niece, my brother and SiL were extremely reluctant to let her have the MMR jab. She had childhood eczema, very much like I did at that age. This was before the autism thing. They tried to get individual, staggered jabs and faced pretty much a brick wall on it. Not sure what the situation was like a few years later when Soph was born, but I have also heard of other parents having problems.

Not sure where I read it now, but a couple of years ago when this was doing the rounds of the cellar before, I went checking out some stuff and found an artcle in which medical professionals were arguing that the problem was parents trying to stagger the jabs, because in their opinion, many parents never take their child to complete the programme, once the first one is done. Which, they said, was why they were strongly encouraging parents not to opt for the single jabs. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe there were very few circumstances in which the NHS would provide single jabs. In order to get single jabs, these parents would have to pay private fees, where parents accepting the MMR would get it for free. Not sure whether that's still the case. I suspect it's another of those postcode lottery situations, where it depends on your local health authority.

So, parents who wanted to stagger their child's jabs, were treated as a problem. And, made to feel that they were being individually, and socially, irresponsible for not simply accepting the MMR as matter of course.

The medical profession, especially after the autism thing, haven't responded to parents with doubts as if they are rational responsible adults; they have instead responded with judgmental hysteria. Parents, who have accepted their wisdom on the need to vaccinate, but who have sought to personalise that according to unknown risks (unknown to the medical profession as well) and their own responsibility to their children, have been configured in the press and by medical professionals as hysterical, irrational and socially dangerous. Rather than facilitating increase in take up, they have pushed away people who were in fact open to their ideas. By insisting that their way was the only way, they made the situation far worse.