Harry Hocking was just 14 when he texted his mother to tell her he was in desperate trouble and needed help. On the way to school, he had become frozen with anxiety and unable to breathe or walk. Such was his distress that his mother, Niamh, had to carry him back home, where she spent hours calming him down. “When I called the school,” she says, “they told me he was probably manipulating me and if I just brought him in everything would be fine. But I know my son. I knew it wouldn’t be.”
Emma Hester, another mother of a school-refuser, believes that the school advice she followed traumatised her six-year-old daughter, Grace, who has ADHD and autism. When Grace was in Year One, she wouldn’t get dressed. But Emma was told to bring her into school in her pyjamas and they would do the rest. “To my shame, I did just that,” she says. “I dragged her into the head’s office in her pyjamas where I was told ‘well done’ for getting her in. Basically, that’s what matters for the school: its attendance record. But there was my child, a gibbering wreck, and now I’m horrified at what we inflicted on her.”
These two children are not alone. One in five pupils is currently persistently absent from school — a number that has doubled since the pandemic — and the education system is panicking. While parents report distress, anxiety and stress, the Department for Education launched what has been described as an insensitive and patronising exercise in “parent shaming”, in an attempt to get these “ghost children” back in the classrooms. The “Moments matter, attendance counts” campaign features smiling children at school with strap-lines such as “This morning he had a runny nose…but look at him now!” and “This morning she was worried about school…but look at her now!”
“They are pitting parents against their children and against teachers,” says Niamh. “When you’re struggling with children who are unable to go to school for a variety of serious reasons, and then you see a poster telling you to get your kid into school and everything will be alright, it suggests it’s your fault.”
A huge number of parents are feeling similarly frustrated at the lack of support for their children, and the insensitivity of the DfE. The Facebook group “Not Fine in School”, set up to support parents of school refusers, now has 33,000 despairing members. One, Claire Gill, wrote: “My son has severe anxiety. We had a well-being person talk to him weekly, which helped him cope, and he looked forward to speaking to them as it was a release. Now, school has stopped the wellbeing person, saying what he has learnt is on his iPad and he can look at that if he gets anxious, [and that] talking is only a temporary fix and he needs to basically learn to manage it himself. He is 10.”
Part of the problem, according to many members of this group, and a majority of the parents I spoke to, is that neither the Government nor the schools are properly addressing the youth mental health crisis. The official numbers are shocking — and that’s only the cases we know about. In the past five years, the number of children claiming disability allowance for anxiety has risen by 70%. And according to a recent survey by the mental health charity stem4, an alarming 28% of secondary school pupils have missed school because of anxiety in the past year. Those suffering the most tend to be children with neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD or autism.
Obviously, the pandemic must bear some of the blame. The clinical psychologist Dr Naomi Fisher puts it bluntly: “Their playgrounds were locked. Their opportunities to play were taken away. Normal life stopped. It was particularly earth-shattering for children, because they found it hard to hang on to what life had been like before.” When these kids went back to school, they were under pressure to catch up educationally, rather than focus on their psychological well-being. The news was full of horror stories about falling grades, not worsening mental health. But it didn’t take long for that damage to show itself.
The result is a system that can no longer cope with the numbers of children presenting with mental health complications. While it was hard enough for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to get help before the pandemic, things are now far worse. More parents than ever are applying for assessment and treatment in the hope of accessing an education, health and care plan (EHCP). But according to the DfE, only 49.2% of applications are established within the requisite 20 weeks, down from 59.9% in 2021. Hundreds of children are waiting more than two years to be issued with the plan that details the support they need.
While requests for EHCPs have surged, funding for them has not. And this growing burden is crippling local authorities. According to the County Council’s Network, which represents 20 county councils and 17 unitary councils, they are not receiving enough financial support from central government. This year, councils’ budget deficits accrued on Send spending are expected to rise from £2.4 billion to £3.6 billion.
It all points to a system in crisis. Emma tells me it took eight years for her daughter, Grace, now 11, to be diagnosed with autism. She still isn’t receiving the help she needs and hasn’t been in school since last October. Emma has taken matters into her own hands and is taking an MA in occupational therapy in order to provide support for Grace herself.
“It’s a two-year course, but that’s still faster than waiting for Grace to get help on the NHS,” she says. “The system is broken. We’ve got a cohort of neurotypical children who can just about manage in a school system. Then you’ve got a big cohort of autistic people with learning difficulties, and they naturally fit into specialist schools.” But, she tells me, it’s the in-betweeners — the cohort of autistic youngsters who don’t have learning difficulties, but really struggle in a large, noisy, overwhelming environment — who are being failed. These children are afraid of school, hate the scratchy uniforms — many children with autism have hypersensitive skin — and can’t cope with the chaos of the playground or dinner hall. “They simply can’t manage,” says Emma. “And the school is doing nothing to reduce the things that they don’t have to stress about.”
Emma is not alone in feeling that her child’s difficulties aren’t being taken seriously. Last year, in a paper entitled “School distress and the school attendance crisis: A story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need”, psychology researchers at Newcastle University interviewed 947 parents of children who struggled to attend school because of what they termed “school distress”. The researchers found that 92% of these children were described as “neurodivergent” as opposed to “neurotypical”, with 83.4% being autistic — hardly the picture being painted by the DfE’s “it’s just a sniffle” campaign.
No wonder parents are desperate. “They feel their employers, their friends, social services, the local authority and their child’s teachers don’t believe them, aren’t listening and don’t want to hear,” says Dr Sinéad Mullally, one of the authors of the Newcastle paper. “The DfE campaign just feeds into that lack of societal understanding of the problem. Simply getting your child into school won’t solve the problem if the school is the problem.”
This disdain is borne out by what happened to nine-year-old Ellie Green. She has ADHD and autism, and though she loves school, she can suffer from debilitating bouts of anxiety and hypersensitivity. The experience of her mother, Nancy, is typical of so many parents I spoke to.
“Ellie is academically very capable and has always been articulate, so at school they tend not to see how much she struggles in other areas,” Nancy tells me. Ellie often attends school wearing her PE kit, because it is more comfortable than the uniform. But this makes her feel different. “The need to obey the rules and be different at the same time can make her extremely anxious,” she says. “And when she struggles, as is often the case with autistic children, she may growl or make animal noises and the way a teacher responds to this could either calm the situation or send Ellie into a meltdown… A simple understanding of this would go a long way, but sometimes it can result in a teacher punishing or belittling a child.”
All too often, teachers are at a loss as to what to do. They simply aren’t equipped with the strategies to help. According to the 2023 annual education report from the National Autistic Society (NAS), only 14% of secondary school teachers had had more than half a day of autism training. Among primary teachers the figure was 39%. More money being spent on special needs provision probably wouldn’t make a significant difference to Ellie, but a change in the way children like her are treated would. As Tim Nicholls, at the National Autistic Society, told me: “School shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise in attendance. It should be about ensuring all children get the support they need to be able to thrive from well-trained staff who understand their needs. Instead of shaming parents and children for low attendance at school, the government should prioritise urgent reform of the education system.” And while it’s a little more complicated than blowing a runny nose, it wouldn’t actually cost that much.
The Government’s response to this growing catastrophe is to identify problems earlier, and to spend an extra £440 million in 2024-25. This will take spending on SEND to £10.5 billion — an increase of 60% in five years. The Labour Party hasn’t added much, which, as it prepares for government, doesn’t provide anxious parents with much solace. But as Catriona More from the Independent Provider of Education Advice says, just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to make much difference. Local authorities aren’t motivated to ensure that children are given the help to which they’re already entitled. “Following the law seems to be widely regarded as an optional activity, with very little requirement on local authorities to be accountable for this,” she says. “The existing SEND system doesn’t need fundamental reform: it needs to be made to work as it should.”
Not everyone is so positive about the existing system. Others believe wholesale change is required, at least to find a way to understand why so many children need help. Dr Fisher believes that this means facing up to the effects and aftermath of the pandemic. “What is missing in government thinking is accepting that this generation has gone through a massive event in their lives, which undermined the sense of safety that many of them had in the world,” she says.
And right now, the Government doesn’t seem to grasp the extent of the problem. DfE sources insist that the attendance campaign was intended only to discourage absenteeism where children had coughs or mild anxiety rather than serious SEND issues — though they didn’t define “mild” anxiety. But such is the rigidity of our education system, there seems to be little or no attempt to interrogate the reason for these high levels of absenteeism.
Such a careless attitude towards vulnerable children shames the system and consigns that cohort to a bleak future. A child’s needs must come first — not a school’s targets. And if a student is reluctant to go to school, it’s a sign of a greater problem. Perhaps we need to rethink the role of schools: increasingly, they are becoming more rigid in focus — more vocational and less creative. Throwing cash unthinkingly at this is neither going to help the anxious children nor regain the confidence of parents.
“The problem is that they aren’t listening to us, and don’t seem able to learn anything from what we’re trying to tell them,” says Ellie’s mother, Nancy. “Education should be the key to unlocking the world and a passport to freedom. By that measure, more and more of our children are becoming prisoners.”
*Some names and locations have been omitted or changed in order to protect the identities of children.
Steve Boggan is an investigative journalist and former Chief Reporter at The Independent. He is also the author of Follow the Money and Gold Fever.
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SubscribeChrist I feel sorry for the children of these simpletons. I get the feeling this is predominantly an American problem though as none of my mates in England, Aus or NZ go in for any of this nonsense, even those that were much more sceptical of the Covid vaccines wouldn’t dream of not immunisation of their kids against the likes of measles
I don’t pity these children because their mums are committed to their wellbeing. They prepare them wholesome meals and are taking full parental responsibility for their children. We can disagree on their stance towards vaccines but there are far worse parents in the world, (at least these mums are making what they feel is a considered/researched decision rather than just not being bothered).
Parents who pump out children for the state to raise. Parents who give in to every demand their child makes because they can’t be bothered with the drama and effort saying no brings with it. Parents who spoil their children because it assuages their guilt for being too busy with work. As well as the obvious bad parents who abuse and neglect their children. Parents who control every aspect of their children’s lives because they don’t trust them to make their own decisions, and in doing so, deny them of learning how to make good choices and grow up believing that it is acceptable to control others. There are many problems our society faces because of the consequences of rubbish parenting and a measles outbreak is just one of them.
So because there are worse parents in the world these idiots should get a free pass?
I’m sure all that “research” and wholesome meals will be appreciated when the kid is laying dead from measles or crippled by polio
1 confirmed death, sir. And we are not given the full gamut of information regarding confounding factors and comorbidities.
If you think that one death from a measles outbreak justifies the kind of response on here from most of the pro vaccine types, then heaven help us all once big pharma have managed to invent a vaccine for every other potential one in a million ailment that could strike us down at any moment. Vaccination for car accidents vaccination for Shark attack where does it end? I know it ends in the coffers of big pharma. Vax schedule looks like the guy out of Hellraiser. No thanks.
Then don’t get vaccinated. Freedom to choose is a good thing for everything, including abortion.
Not to mention Pollio.
We might be in for a return to the old SSPE wards. During the 1970’s I worked in a hospital in Queensland Australia with a number of wards full of patients with untreatable degenerative diseases such as advanced Parkinson’s, Schizophrenics with dementia and so forth. There were 2 wards no one wanted to work on- the Hydrocephalus ward- babies with enormous heads distorted by dammed up cerebro-spinal fluid, now a condition easily treated with neurosurgery. The other was the SSPE ward- children aged 7 to 10 years old who died slowly of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare complication of measles. Rare [between 2 or 3 per thousand cases of measles], but enough to fill a ward. They may have had fun while they had measles, but sometimes it takes a dose of reality to appreciate the advances we have made in the last 50 years.
That’s a great dose of reality; thank you for sharing your experience.
According to encephalitis.info SSPE occurs in approx 2 per 100,000 naturally occurring cases of measles. That is 100x less common than you claim in your comment.
Well said.
The crunchy moms’ fervour on such matters has turned them into a potent political force, one that forms a critical part of Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They have managed to make the day-to-day business of motherhood — what their children are eating, what kind of medical care they receive, what products they use — a key political issue. And their Covid era-fuelled suspicion of the medical and scientific establishment has become a defining tendency on the Right. The alliance that formed between the New-Age hippies and the conspiracy theorist nut-jobs was always the weirdest thing about COVID for me,
Another species of emotionally incontinent American with mediocre intelligence.
Who do you mean: the subject or the writer? Ambiguous comments are easily misconstrued.
So true.
Sounds nice, but what could you get out of speaking to them ‘on their terms’? They do not believe in arguments, they already know everything, and they have the US government to tell them they are right. A sufficiently large number of dead children might change their minds. More likely they would find some conspiracy to blame for the result of their own actions.
You do realize that measles deaths were dropping like a rock (by over 2 orders of magnitude) prior to the introduction of the measles/MMR vaccine in the early 60s.
The issue is really simple. Many people who are pro-vaccine treat vaccines like a religious faith rather than examine the risks and benefits of individual vaccine and of the childhood vaccination schedule in general. To deny the existence of adverse events only serves to increase vaccine hesitancy. It is always best to be completely open and transparent.
On the chart I see, measles cases dropped by about one third from the 1950s to 1963 when the first measles vaccine was introduced. The chart shows cases, not deaths, so you might be right but it seems unlikely given the modest reduction in cases. There was a rapid drop in cases from around 1963 to the 1970s.
Need to go back earlier to see the real impact from improved diet and public health.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9150958/
Measles mortality fell markedly (>90%) from the 19th century to mid-20th century prior to introduction of measles vaccine or the widespread use of antibiotics for secondary bacterial infections
The drop since the measles vaccine has been very minor.
So measles deaths were dropping, and then once people became scared by a long disproved study and stopped taking the vaccine the deaths started to rise again?
It’s almost as if the vaccines were working!
One of the problems is Bobby Kennedy. He lies about the studies that have been done. He shifts positions to his own benefit. He is unopen and untransparent. Yet he holds the top job in the United States for public health.
Exactly.
“Formula was full of dangerous chemicals, as was sunscreen, as was most processed food available in the supermarket;”
Which of these is false?
Defenders of the status quo are bizarrely incurious about the rise in obesity, autism, allergies, autoimmune disorders and other chronic diseases.
It’s not just that people are now living long enough to accumulate ailments. Young people are increasingly unwell, mentally and physically.
I don’t know that vaccines are a prime culprit, but I do know that adjuvants are neurotoxic, studies on safety & efficacy are fraudulent, and links to autoimmune disorders are plausible.
It’s also true that most of the diseases of concern declined before the widespread availability of vaccines, thanks to improved sanitation and nutrition. And outbreaks can be caused by the vaccines themselves.
If you want to reduce vaccine hesitancy, insist on proper science (saline placebos, no unblinding, long term health monitoring).
Exactly.
Why bother? There is already lots and lots of proper science to prove that vaccines are good and helpful. People do not believe it because they do not want to believe it. Why would they believe in the next lot?
Not all vaccines are created equal. In particular, the safety and efficacy of adjuvant assisted “vaccines” is not only untested, but evidence has emerged in the last couple of decades that they harm the immune system’s ability to cope with novelty.
Adjuvants are used, because the clever immune system seems to understand that non-replicating pathogens do not require the same treatment as replicating pathogens. What adjuvants do is irritate the immune system to take notice of anything that is around – probably the reason there has been an explosion of allergy affliction in the cohorts who were vaccinated routinely as children with adjuvant-assisted “vaccines”.
No one has studied the effects of multiple doses of adjuvant on children’s health.
There is absolutely a need to do some proper science on the childhood vaccine schedule (almost all of which are adjuvant assisted). My guess is that a proper investigation will lead to the deprecation (or even ban) of adjuvant “vaccines”.
And polio?
Can you provides some sources? I suspect you haven’t actually read these vaccine studies.
Yes, it’s the usual scripted attack on people who choose another more effective way to deal with their immune system. See thehighwire.com for real science and discussion on these matters.
If you believe there’s nothing to see here, it’s because you haven’t looked into it.
The main thing those attacking vaccines claim is not that the science supports their attack, but that there hasn’t been enough science. But that’s a weak argument.
Not to forget declining sperm counts.
Perhaps that’s nature’s way of saying “Stop breeding, folks, your species has become undesirable”.
Which is worse, the chemicals on the suncream or skin cancer?
Maybe it is not a question of either/or but simply a question of avoiding intensive exposure to the sun. Suncream also blocks the body’s ability to develop Vitamin D.
100% while I entertain the idea that there are professional Astroturfers in operation where ever people like this put their propaganda, I am mystified by the true believers who don’t seem to see just how bad society has become in terms of health and mental health. When I look at my grandparents generation, I see none of what I see today. Rarely was anyone ever fat. Most people lived very long ages – far longer than the current crop in spite of the advances in so-called medication and science.
ironically, It’s these people who stand to benefit the most from the policies that Mr Kennedy intends to implement.
What people fail to recognize is that vaccines (cow in Latin) like mercury fillings are extremely toxic to some people, harmful to others and neutral to others. Today in 2025 and thanks to the lunacy of covid we have a number of other very effective nutritional and medical treatments. Get off our back and inject your pin hole pillow bodies all you want!
So, if you have children, you’d have no hesitation in enrolling them in one of your proposed blinded placebo-v-vaccine trials?
In all fairness, governments have created this issue. Whenever they push through a vaccine with attached legislation that protects them and the pharmaceutical companies from being sued. Tony Blair’s government did it with one of the animal related flu’s and, of course, Covid. Nothing destroys trust like it.
My children had all of their childhood vaccines, however I also home educated my children and every time I have to deal with schools for work, I’m reminded exactly why. I also grew up drinking raw milk (over 40 years ago) and it was delicious. It’s also not just “crunchy mums” that think processed food is bad, last year my news feed was full of articles where “experts” were declaring UPFs the worst thing you can put in your body. I appreciate that vaccine fear is dangerous, however throwing all these other attributes in as examples of nut jobs is equally harmful. UPF is devoid of nutrition and fibre. Schools have lost control of their wards and so have parents who are too busy to say no. Raw milk is increasingly difficult to get hold, so not even sure why it’s considered an issue. The author appears more hysterical than the crunchy mums!
The proof is in the pudding, as they say.
“This could be the moment for liberals to somehow reach out to the crunchy moms…”
And what are you going to say to them when you ‘reach out’? You have spent the whole article deliberately referring to them by a silly and childish name.
I think it might be more accurate to say that their ‘delusions’ were fed more by our recent actual experience of the Covid ‘vaccines’.
The inefficacy of these experimental products was self apparent to anyone who wasn’t themselves deluded by relentless propaganda. And never mind the alarming rate of adverse reactions also witnessed first or second hand by many, and evident in official statistics (eg Yellow Card data) for anyone who cares to look.
Sadly confidence in all forms of vaccination is now badly fractured, and it is this that Kennedy is feeding off.
Well it is not just a question of RFK feeding of this. The truth is that the US childhood vaccination schedule is way more aggressive than the UK or European one. For example, HepB vaccination for 1 day old babies who are obviously not IV drug users and don’t engage in unprotected sex. The issue for vaccine products is that the vast majority have not been properly tested against true placebo controls (as opposed to adjuvants without the vaccine which doesn’t exclude side effects from the adjuvants!). There are certainly issues with the adjuvants used that needs to be investigated and appropriate changes made if necessary (e.g. in the use of aluminum adjuvants). Further, it is absolutely essential to have true informed consent. That doesn’t mean your family doctor pushing a one street narrative, but presenting parents with a proper description of the risks and benefits.
It is also worth recalling than deaths from measles in the US was already falling like a rock before the MMR vaccine was introduced in the early 60s, presumably because of improved nutrition. Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t get an MMR shot and I’ve had several as an adult, although not as a child since I had measles and mumps, but not Rubella. as an adult during medical residency (at UCLHS), I got the Rubella shot and woke up 3 weeks later with a massively enlarged lymph node in the neck and an enlarged spleen upon examination. An enlarge lymph node in the neck is considered a lymphoma unless proven otherwise (at least it was in the UK at the time) and it was removed for biopsy the next day. 10 days later got the path report which simply said non-specific inflammation. Only then did I recall being vaccinated for Rubella 3 weeks prior. Lesson learned. No matter how safe a product may be, there are always adverse reactions, even if extremely rare, and one should be made aware of these. Hd I been told that enlarged lymph nodes were a possible sequelae of Rubella vaccination I would have avpoided the worry and the biopsy.
Can confirm: the cord had barely been cut when we were asked about the Day One HepB vaccine. When were given a print out of the standard vaccine schedule, the first appointment included at least 6 vaccine administrations (ie, MMR counts as 1 vaccine administration, not 3). We elected to have no more than 2 vaccine administrations per appointment (and therefore have more appointments), and baby still ran a mild fever and was visibly fatigued afterward.
Of course everyone understands that one day old babies are not intravenous drug users or gay men. But they have just been born in a bloody process that may have given them HepB from a mother who may have the disease undetected. That’s the reason for it.
It’s always good to ask questions. But there are rarely easy answers. These are judgment calls that must be made with limited information. Yet both sides of the debate make claims stronger than the evidence supports.
Ludicrous. Most mothers at risk would be easy to spot. The rest is a gravy train with potentially horrendous side effects for the unlucky.
“Most mothers at risk would be easy to spot”. Oh wise one, can you tell us what a woman with undiagnosed Hep B looks like?
Ah, vaccines, we are almost into religion territory when it come to vaccines.
I cannot make up my mind about vaccines for the following reasons:
A few important points need to examined before engaging in the discussion:
1) no vaccine has ever been gold standard tested: is a vaccinated population healthier than a non vaccinated one??? (if you ask this question to an expert on vaccines you get no answer…I have tried a few times) (and then there are the annoying studies such as The Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural ExperimentMogensen, Søren Wengel et al.eBioMedicine, Volume 17, 192 – 198)
2) every vaccine has its own story and reason: every vaccine should be studied individually for its benefits for a population. Talking about vaccins as one way of doing medicine is very reductionist.
3) then there is this article that shows that many ‘infectious illnesses issues ‘were already improving vastly before modern medecine has come to the table https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/draining-the-swamp
4) how effectif are vaccines??? is there real good data? Statisticians have looked for it and the data is at the most unsure.. Check the work of Pierre Chaillot on data relating to covid and vaccines in general. https://www.decitre.fr/livres/covid-19-ce-que-revelent-les-chiffres-officiels-9782810011520.html. (BTW the profits of his books go to charities of people have ‘covid’ related issues…)
Note1: as a vet I have seen vaccines seemingly working and failing more or less 50/50… (my impression, I did not keep data) Usually good hygiene and health seemed at least as effective
Note 2: covid vaccines were not vaccines: they were an experiment of a new type of medicines… hence we cannot use the covid arguments against the general question of vaccines.
Note 3: I use vaccines every day because that is what my clients want: In EBM the preference and individual sensititivies of the patient (in my case owner) are 1/3rd part of the decision making. (see Sacket et all on EBM ; what it is and what it is not: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8555924/. )
I wish I could just be confident about what is the general consensus on vaccines, there is just too much lack of good data creating an environment of uncertainty
Many diseases that used to be common have all but been eradicated in first world countries (at least they had before imbeciles stopped vaccinating their kids), therefore I’d say the immunisations have been rather successful wouldn’t you?
What extra proof do you require?
A good, balanced comment.
I’ll just pick up on this bit: “hence we cannot use the covid arguments against the general question of vaccines.”
True, there are likely to be issues specific to mRNA.
But COVID did teach us (or remind us) something about Big Pharma: they put profits before people, even when children are concerned.
There was no possible justification for giving novel medical treatments to people who weren’t at risk from COVID.
Good points. Trouble is, there’s no way to get better data. The ethics rules against experimenting on humans prevent the kind of experiments that would be most useful. We have to work with the data we have, and it leaves many questions open.
Once upon a time we all had (and survived) measles, mumps, chicken pox, and tonsillectomies. We didn’t have ADHD, autism, and obesity.
We did not all survive – some children died of rare complications (when all children get a disease even rare complications happen quite a lot). See the post by sal b dyer above
The media does not shed a tear for the vaccine injured but we’re supposed to go hysterical for a measles death we know little about?
You certainly did have ADHD and Autism, they were simply less diagnosed or called other things. Now there is an argument that some children are now over diagnosed with the conditions whereby simply personality quirks are given a label (especially in America where it’s in the hospitals interests to hand out as many drugs as possible) but that is a seperate issue.
Obesity is unrelated
I am 90 years old. Eighty years ago I was an unruly brat in primary school in wartime London who also swore a lot, but I matured, passed scholarships, entered medical school at eighteen, and became a general surgeon with double Fellowships. Now I know that I had “ADHD” and a touch of Tourette’s.
I do wonder about the current scare over measles.
When I was a growing up if one child had the measles all the neighbourhood children were sent to play with them. We had a measles party so we would all catch it at the same time.
Now it’s treated as a deadly disease and the media reports seem to exaggerate the dangers.
O dear I see comments on this essay are in “special measures”, which normally means a three hour wait before the Censor deigns the comment worthy of publication or otherwise.
How very disappointing.
There is evidence linking vaccines to autism. It is just that there is also evidence, and possibly more, of no link.
However charts of measles deaths clearly show that deaths dropped enormously before the vaccine and very little afterwards so maybe vaccine not that effective. And all vaccines have side effects, just read the safety leaflet for each vaccine.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-details/measles-mumps-and-rubella-vaccines#otherquestionsyoumighthave
There is no evidence, good evidence at least, linking vaccines to autism that I have seen. Bobby Kennedy has cited studies to support his view that vaccines cause autism, but those studies are flawed.
https://merylnass.com/2011/05/11/did-vaccines-cause-autism-us-government/
The US Government has paid for 83 children who became autistic after vaccination
and often ‘disagreeable’ research is hidden:
https://merylnass.com/2024/11/21/there-has-long-been-damning-evidence-of-how-cdc-covered-up-vaccine-induced-autism-black-male-toddlers-who-received-the-mmr-at-a-young-age-were-at-3-4-times-the-risk-of-autism-as-other-children/
Ah, the “flawed”falacy. Finding a flaw in a study that otherwise demontrates a clear signal, does not necessarily mean the signal isn’t real, it often just means just means the study has flaws or inperfections. This is one if the great strawman approaches of the pharma industrial complex when its horrendous outcomes are identified by clinicians / organisations paying attention. They claim that unless it’s a large randomised control trial, it isn’t science and should therefore be ignored. And guess who the only entities wealthy enough to carry out $20m+ large RCTs are? It’s slight of hand. Are you suggesting the flaws in eg Mawson study 2025 (Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study
of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid) completely negate the conclusion that vaccinated vs unvaccinated children have worse overall neurodevelopmental health outcomes? Show me where the conclusion MUST be entirely rejected based on its “flaws”? At worst the precision of the data may be off, but the overall effect and direction of the signal is very clear and is obviously worthy of funding and further study by government given the pathologies observed.
the measles outbreaks are nothing new, and also are happening across the world so putting the blame on RFK fall flat.
Measles, polio and whooping cough are serious childhood diseases that can and do kill or leave children disabled. I am thankful that my children were vaccinated in the 1970s against them. We forget about smallpox, diphtheria and tetanus vaccines which have saved thousands of lives in Britain. What is different today is the age at which babies are vaccinated and the number of vaccines they get given in one go. I would suggest that these modern mums check it all out carefully and vaccinate only for the real killers which even the lowly measles CAN be. I wouldn’t wish any pregnant Mum to come into contact unwittingly with German Measles either, yet it is so insignificant in children.
I remain very sceptical about the COVID vaccine because of its side effects and no longer receive it BUT it is completely different in its make-up to the childhood vaccines.
RFk’s aversion to vaccination is badly misplaced. Not all vaccines are equally effective and have varying side effects, but most are very safe and very effective (our COVID experience notwithstanding). The MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella is one of the effective ones. Having grown up before vaccination for measles was available, I had “measles” at least twice as a small child. Rubeola is the most dangerous among rubella, rubeola (actual measles), and roseola – three distinct diseases commonly called “measles”. I know that one of the times was “German measles” (rubella). I was hospitalized for over two weeks with encephalitis when I was five – possibly as a result of one of my measles episodes; however, I was blessed to have suffered no permanent ill effects.
Rubella and measles (rubeola) are both preventable, along with mumps, by vaccination – which has virtually eliminated them in the U.S. There are many things that can be done to improve the health of Americans. Some of RFK’s initiatives warrant actual study (as opposed to the anecdotal), but many of them are spurious, and some of them are just plain stupid. On balance, RFK is a flake and Trump will, or at least should, rue the day he made the political deal and appointed him to his current position.
If you only ‘believe’ this because it’s what you feel, then I would urge you to start doing some real research. A nice place to start would be the grueling and indomitable “The Real Anthony Fauci”. If you even dared to read this you should immediately become at least cynical about you beliefs, if not repentant and traumatised.
However, the reality is that most people would never be bothered reading such along and arduous book in the pursuit of even just one truth (that they are keen to avoid), lest that one pesky FACT trigger a tsnuami so large that it bears impossible to ignore and wipe away for good.
Spoiler alert: This book is so replete with so many inconvenient, oft untold facts about REAL people and their ruined lives; past, present and future, that it is the Tsunami you cannot forget.
Did you know that this withering prosecution of the countless crimes against society/humanity that Fauci et al committed is a best seller on Amazon? Still, almost 4 years later, a best-seller AND not one injunction or lawsuit to this day! Got to make you wonder, huh? Time to wake up!
For a very thorough and informative rundown on measles, mumps, and rubella and the associated (MMR) vaccine, see the website of the “The Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia [which] provides complete, up-to-date and reliable information about vaccines across the lifespan.” https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-details/measles-mumps-and-rubella-vaccines#otherquestionsyoumighthave
That is interesting. Unfortunately, Paul Offit is too strident with his advocacy, and fails to even acknowledge the valid reasons for concern about vaccines. That polarization is unfortunate.
The leftists hate motherhood and this is not a bug, this is a feature. That is why mothers ceased to trust vaccines that are approved by mostly leftist MSM. COVID was only the trigger
“for every thorny parenting dilemma, they have an answer”
Just like leftists do – blame racism, trust their experts.
I had to Google “crunchy moms” – the reference is to homemade granola apparently – and they seem to believe in a mixture of sensible things like healthy eating, and daft things like wellness and new age style claptrap. Doubtless there is a continuum.
But compared to some of the daftness of mainstream lifestyles, it might not be such a bad thing if more people leaned a bit more “crunchy”.
Am I being too callous in thinking that it is the seriousness of the disease which justifies vaccination, and where the disease is not especially serious we should perhaps leave it to the human immune system.
This is what happened in the past. If kids locally got mumps, measles, chicken pox or German measles, all the other kids got sent round to see them – by their mums. This was normal practice.
I’ll say it again: vaccination has become the nuclear power of the right. Staying away from known good technologies purely to mark tribal identification is why we willl lose to China.
Lucky for many of ‘us’, ‘we’ don’t fall into your smear. In fact, at the time we refused the first jab, I was one of the many who despised Trump and his administration and feared where the world was headed. Boy have things changed..
I very much doubt Kennedy’s version of his experience of measles. Measles carries a serious risk of blindness if children are not kept in a darkened room well away from any light.
Perhaps he’s thinking of chicken pox.
As a genealogist, I’ve read tens of thousands of public records and visited countless cemeteries doing research for families interested in their ancestry. Most of those records and graves are from the pre-vaccine era. In those centuries childhood mortality was a ubiquitous scourge affecting nearly all families, and most of it derived from infectious diseases: measles, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, tetanus, polio, etc. I cannot count how many nuclear families I have encountered records of that reflect, not only the lost of one of their children to disease, but the loss of three or four or more. One learns early in genealogy research that the abbreviation “D.Y” beside a name in a family tree stands for “died young”.
The best case for vaccination against childhood disease is historical. Those who believe these to be benign natural experiences of some halcyon days of yore are simply ignorant fools.
Where are the fathers in this? You know, the men,
Buzzfeed and The Atlantic? OMG Freddy, what the actual f*ck?
This is some of the most unhinged, divisive and detrimental CRAP I have ever read in my time subscribed to Unherd.
I left the Guardian in dismay and disgust – I felt dirty and betrayed. My ‘tote bag’ had transitioned twice over those few painful years; first, it was turned inside out from shame; second, it was relegated to filthy jobs around the garden, never to be seen in public again.
I thought Unherd was the salvation. Soon after discovering it, I eagerly subscribed in order to show my support – to be part of the solution.
And now this?
I realise that there is a slim chance this ‘journalist’ is possibly a true believer and even perhaps another who has fallen in her mind’s battle with TDS (Trump derangement Syndrome). In that scenario, I can feel a tiny bit of pity for her, while I feel no-such for the editorial staff at Unherd.
However, the likelihood that she is yet another feeder from the organ of statehood just creaming off the top, AT MY EXPENSE, is truly horrifying.
Well, I am a crunchy dad who is doing his darnedest not to let the bastards keep me down, so I won’t dissect the author for Pyrrhic pleasure.
I am sitting this one out. Unherd and Unsubscribed.
Reading the comments here just makes me feel sad for humanity and annoyed by the sophistication of current troll armies these days thanks to chat gpt. Well, to all of those below who are genuinely all in on vaccines and given up on healthy living and a strong natural immune system, enjoy your wine, beer, sugar, meds and endless treatments.
Signed, a guy who barely gets a head cold in every two years, feels happy and wishes he wasn’t paying for the rest of you in the health system!
Wow, what a condescending view of these mothers and their concerns. Ask yourself why are you a vaccine zealot showing no proof of any studies on autism? There are a number of treatments, ironically including chicken soup and loving care that you, this pharma crazed author, obviously have negated.
Why have all of the likes and dislikes on comments reset? Glitch in the Matrix?