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.
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 bury their child and go back home.
They sit there unable to cry anymore, the silence is broken from a cough in the younger child’s 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.
You would be surprised to know that some people today unironically believe that the germ theory is a hoax, and yes it’s the demographic you are suspecting.
People back in the day were scared of inoculation/vaccination as well. See the following comic about a cow pox inoculation turning people into cows: https://www.themorgan.org/sites/default/files/images/blog/gillray_277009v_0001.jpg
It’s not just a modern phenomena.
Which god? There’s so many, how do you keep them all straight. Apollo? Zeus? It’s Ra, isn’t it? I bet you’re talking about Ra!
I’m sure people prayed to them all.
I’m sure none answered.
Man answered, just too late for millions.
You’re being downvoted but I agree. None of this has anything to do with religion. A weird fiction that invokes “[the Christian] God provided the vaccine” is irrelevant and disrespectful to the humans that worked hard to create a vaccine.
It’s a pretty bad idea in general to bring up a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent “God” in the context of children dying of diseases anyway. What kind of God would allow children to die of cancer? Or any number of other currently incurable diseases?
I think they’re saying they prayed to their “god” and from their perspective “their god” delivered through science.
Not that god actually did anything
I actually meant it more like humans hold the power of a God in their hands. Something that could only have been seen as magical, as fairytale, as something humans do not have at their disposal. It only exists out there to beings that are not our own. That’s who people pray to because it is beyond man’s powers, children were beyond saving.
I didn’t mean it as the work of God for I’m an atheist. I meant it like they prayed to a God and got ignored. But through science we created Godlike powers.
I would say antibiotics and vaccines are literal God powers. Not from God but if you went back 100 years with that power people would think you a God.
Anti vaccine rhetoric has an extremely high correlation to religious people. The commentor was speculating about how these people in the past would have felt about the anti vaccine people today. It’s a valid question. People back then didn’t have access to information or access to much real hope; it’s not surprising they were religious.
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.
“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.
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.
But you want to actively not-accuse her…
Benefit of the doubt
“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.
That’s fair, she seemingly learned her lesson at the cost of her son’s life, so people shouldn’t pile on. But she is not getting an ounce of sympathy from me.
Nah, fuck that kid killing idiot.
Yay bodyshaming, huh?
…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.
Yes, absolutely. But it’s still total garbage that the revelation comes only after her poor son is effected personally. People need to realise and care their shit takes have devastating real world consequences not only for themselves but others around them.
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!
Fucked around, found out, and killed an innocent kid.
I remember when antivacxxers were just mainly the bud end of every joke. Now when i vrowse tinder there are more and more women who are looking for smart and unvaccinated and pure men. These fuckers are gonna reproduce
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if ooonly someone had told her… are you kidding me.
Did you read the article? She’s not saying that she didn’t know that measles are dangerous, she’s saying that she thinks people would vaccinate more and sooner if they knew the potential delayed effects of measles. Her son died 4 years after catching it and he wasn’t vaccinated at 2 because he was on a delayed vaccination program (it doesn’t say why). It’s a super tragic story really and it doesn’t seem like she’s anti-vax or anything like it, quite the opposite.
I’ll blame his/her mistake on the article. Most of the time I don’t have to read the captions of pictures to obtain important information that would have also been in the normal text of the article.
Samuel developed measles aged two in 2014 and recovered, but was admitted to hospital in 2019 after his mother noticed he often lost his balance while walking
Why wasn’t that part in the article proper?
interesting, thank you!
if the problem is these delayed vaccinations, why isnt that the meat of this problem? seems less about communication and more about a failed implementation plan (in general)
Delayed vaccination was an anti vax talking point awhile back: Somehow parents were convinced by morons on the internet that you had to space vaccines out more. Basically once you start questioning the actual science, the more susceptible you are to just never actually finish the vaccine series, so antivaxxers win.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2882604/
Intentionally delayed vaccine doses are not uncommon. Children whose parents delay vaccinations may be at increased risk of not receiving all recommended vaccine doses by 19 months of age and are more vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases. Providers should consider strategies such as educational materials that address parents’ vaccine safety and efficacy concerns to encourage timely vaccination.
For example some doctors, if a baby is suspected to have an acute form “Food protein-induced enterocolitis syndrome” to the egg, they prefer to delay the shot of a few months waiting for the diagnosis, in the tiny chance that if some egg proteins are present in the vaccine (some of them are grew in chicken eggs)
Should sue the school and the government…
So this poor kid catches measles, recovers from it, then 7 years later develops a extremely rare aftereffect that absolutely nobody could have foreseen, which kills him, and your response is “Sue the school and government”?
I was just reading yesterday about an American guy that went into a restaurant in Canada and when ordering a burger, asked for it to be medium cooked. The waiter came back with the burger, and a disclaimer form stating that the customer couldn’t sue the restaurant in case of food poisoning due to undercooked meat.
The customer made a big fuss about it on Reddit, but quite frankly, it’s people with your mentality that bring this about.
It’s just plain fucking greed at this point
The irony is that America isn’t even in the top 3 most litigious countries. That stereotype was a myth that was spread by McDonalds, in the wake of the (now infamous) hot coffee lawsuit.
Basically, a woman was horribly burned by coffee that was way too hot (the coffee was hot enough to melt her labia and fuse it to her thigh) and only wanted McD to pay for her medical bills. It was something like $20k total, once all the skin grafts, reconstructive surgery, rehab, etc was accounted for. McD told her to pound sand. So she sued for the medical bills, because her insurance company required it as a condition of her coverage. Basically, her health insurance didn’t want to pay for it, so they said they’d only cover things after she lost a lawsuit.
In the lawsuit, it was discovered that she wasn’t even the first person to have been injured; McD had been warned numerous times that their coffee was being served too hot (it was near boiling) and that it had horribly injured several people prior to this. But they kept the coffee hot to discourage free refills; People had to wait for their coffee to cool before they drank it, and all that waiting meant fewer refills. So McD repeatedly refused to lower the serving temp of their coffee, because they didn’t want to potentially give people an extra refill.
In the lawsuit, the jury was so horrified that they awarded the woman the large judgement. Again, she was only suing for the medical bills, but they awarded her millions instead, to send a lesson to McD and hopefully get them to reduce the temp of their coffee.
Instead, McD hired an advertising company to run an astroturfing campaign against the woman. They spread the myth that she was a money hungry vulture looking for an easy payday. They dragged her through the mud, and she ended up having a mental breakdown from all of the constant harassment. Simultaneously, they spread the stereotype that Americans are all super litigious and will sue at the smallest inconvenience. Again, to discourage future lawsuits by making people think their (completely legitimate) claims were frivolous.
It’s widely considered to be one of the most successful astroturfing campaigns in history, and comments like yours are proof of that. The stereotype still exists to this day, all because McDonalds didn’t want to give free refills.
It’s still in the top 5 though. And that’s per capita. If you look at the total number of frivolous lawsuits, America number one again, and it’s not even close
Germany and Austria are only in the top 5 because a) the sheer number of laws they have, and b) the fact it that legal action is covered by obligatory insurance
We all remember the McDonald’s case, that has nothing to do with it
The kid was only 6 at time of passing. Not sure what article you’re referencing.
