Well, yes, but if only we could trust the NHS and public health authorities

There's an analogy to those who cry wolf here:

In the early 2000s, after the link between the MMR vaccine and autism was thoroughly debunked, healthcare professionals, including GPs and our teams, worked hard to re-establish public confidence in vaccinations. It took years to restore, but uptake rates in children receiving the MMR vaccine began to improve and there was a time, not so long ago, when we thought we had eradicated measles entirely.

That is why recent data about the surge in measles cases across Europe will come as distressing news – even to us here in the UK.

It's entirely true that vaccines are one of the great health saving innovations, an essential if we're not to have dying children littering the streets. Those against them are indeed deluded.

No, they're not 100% safe, we'd not have a compensation scheme if that were true. But the damage is perhaps 1 in a million, the damage from not vaccination being perhaps a quarter of all children dying before their fifth birthday. You know, those child mortality rates that were common to our history.

However, it's not just the Woo! from people like Wakefield. We've another problem here, which is how the varied public health authorities mislead themselves, giving that opening for the belief that they tell untruths elsewhere.

We've told, vehemently, that smoking, drinking and obesity cost the NHS money - they don't they save it. That there's an epidemic of rising child obesity - when no one is actually measuring child obesity in the first place. That sugar consumption is rising and causing our ills - it ain't, it's falling. Vaping should be limited or banned because Big Tobacco when it's the best anti-tobacco smoking aid yet devised. A few grammes too much salt will murder us all in our beds when those without kidney problems do in fact have self-regulation mechanisms in the body which work rather well.

On the basis of no more than these misunderstandings - to be extremely polite about what we're being told about some of them - the diet of the entire nation is to be reformulated.

And that's before we get to the decades long insistence that animal fats are the root of all dietary evil, recently replaced with a well, err, umm, that might have been an error (*Ahem*, *foot shuffle*).

All of which is a bit of a problem, isn't it? Our public health "authorities" have been telling us untruths - at the very least - on a number of subjects. Which rather undermines their authority when we meet real untruths from the other side, as with the desirability of vaccination.

The solution being obvious here. If they were to wind their necks in and only comment upon or do those things which are absolutely true then we'd all listen to them a bit more. Given that, you know, they' be being truthful all the time?

Another way to put this is that the anti-vaccination idiocy gains traction precisely because of the over reach and error of the public health maniacs. Stop it people, you're damaging the health of the nation.