Anti-vaxxers should be forced to visit graveyards

If my child had died of measles, the last person I would want at the funeral would be Robert F Kennedy Jr, the United States health secretary. Nonetheless, he turned up in Lubbock, Texas, to attend the funeral of an eight-year-old girl who had died of this preventable disease. Kennedy is the man now responsible for handling public health. He’s also an anti-vaxxer. Until recently, there had been only three measles deaths in 24 years in the US. Yet now, there have already been three deaths from it in the first three months of 2025. In west Texas there is an outbreak, with 56 hospitalisations. And it’s spreading.

Kennedy is known to be what can politely be termed “eccentric”. This could be because of the pork tapeworm larva found in his brain. Even though pork tapeworm larva can cause memory loss, Kennedy is such a dude that he offered to eat five more “brain worms” to prove himself to be in better shape than anyone else.

Joking or not, I say fire away, sir, get them down your neck. What he does to himself is his business. But his beliefs are harmful to others.

From disbelieving that HIV causes Aids to vaccine denial and his allegiance to all kinds of conspiracy theories, Kennedy’s dangerous spoutings mean that more children will remain unvaccinated and at risk. An anti-vaxxer as health secretary is a disaster in Trump’s shameless administration.

But it struck me that there is another way to show anti-vaxxers the error of their ways.

In the lovely bright sunshine at the weekend, I walked around our local cemetery. It is a beautiful place, one of the magnificent London garden cemeteries built in the Victorian era because of a surge in population. Abney Park, Brompton and Kensal Green are just three of these. You will notice, if you stop and look, the number of children’s graves in each. This is because so many of them died from epidemics of typhus, cholera, smallpox, diphtheria and measles. Some of these diseases are referred to directly on their gravestones. Others more euphemistically state that these children “fell asleep”. A winged skull indicates that life is fleeting. There are many symbols that indicate the grave of a little one: lambs, cherubs, lilies and roses. A bud for a baby, a rose beginning to open for one slightly older.

I was visiting because my grandparents’ son died of diphtheria, and they chose to adopt a child because of their loss. That child was my mother.

We tend to think that such diseases have gone away and mostly they have. Watching a documentary about the late, great Ian Dury, I realised that my kids will not have seen anyone with polio. I have never seen someone with smallpox.

But we know such diseases are coming back. Years ago, my youngest had scarlet fever, and I got it too. As so often happens, she got better very quickly but I was absolutely flattened by the fever and couldn’t get out of bed for days.

My workplace at the time sent me a flower arrangement that resembled a wreath, which was slightly odd, and my friend’s mum from the East End prayed because in her youth, scarlet fever killed you. I saw someone say on social media recently, “All these woke babies who can’t survive a little scarlet fever,” and thought this was both cruel and stupid. Antibiotics saved us.

I always think that if Covid had wiped out children instead of old people, the anti-vaxx stuff would not have taken off in the way it did.

Andrew Wakefield’s entirely discredited work linking autism to the MMR vaccine caused take-up rates to drop. Kennedy is on the same bandwagon: he believes that a form of mercury that’s commonly cited as a “vaccine ingredient”, thimerosal, causes autism.

Yet thimerosal has never been used in MMR, chickenpox or inactivated polio vaccines. Instead, the preservative is used to prevent germs such as bacteria and fungi from contaminating multi-dose vials of vaccines.

Nonetheless, all sorts of people believed all sorts of lunatic theories during the pandemic because, instead of trusting scientists, they trusted Dr YouTube. We live in an age of science denialism. Sex is not real and does not depend on biology but on “feelings”. Vaccines don’t work and may kill you. Some have moved to an almost medieval way of thinking about illness. We bring it upon ourselves. Others have become quite Darwinian about it. Only the strong survive. Maybe we should put our babies out on the hillsides at night and see which ones make it?

During the pandemic, I knew people who went progressively madder about this stuff but I could also see that conspiracy theories provided an online community, then a real-life one, for many lonely people. One woman in my road said she would stop speaking to me if I got vaccinated. Little did she know I had been a volunteer on a medical trial for monoclonal antibodies and had never had Covid.

The fact remains that measles kills. Or may leave you blind and deaf. It’s a nasty disease. It ravaged Samoa in 2019, not long after Kennedy had visited the country and met with anti-vaccine figures (rather than epidemiologists), and contributed to what has been described as a “significant disinformation campaign”. The result was that 5,700 people were infected and 83 people died, most of them children.

Viruses don’t understand that globalisation is “over”.

I wonder whether Kennedy has ever read any books by Roald Dahl. His daughter Olivia was seven when she got ill. “I was sitting on her bed, showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners,” Dahl wrote, “and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.” An hour later, she was unconscious. Twelve hours later, she was dead.

That was measles.