Social media is such an evil. For those that are interested, look up ‘The Cutter Incident’ from the 1950s. In the very early days of the polio vaccine, around 200,000 American children were given a faulty vaccine in which the process of inactiving the live virus component didn’t work. The result was that around 1 in 5 of those children actually developed polio, rather than being vaccinated against it. It’s a really complicated and quite horrifying story and one I explore with our students.
However, the most important part is that this led to better regulation of vaccinations and the process continued. If it happened now, the spread of rumour and innuendo on social media would completely undermine the entire vaccination system and it would all fall apart.