Leading Article: Blair's measly ban

THE LICENCE for the measles vaccine in this country expired some time ago but it was still possible for educated, well-informed, affluent parents to make enough fuss to get it ordered from France and given to their baby as a separate injection. This way they could avoid the risk of their child catching measles and allay their deep-seated unease at unresolved questions about the safety of the combined mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) jab, which many believe is linked to the onset of autism and serious bowel disease. Concern over this MMR vaccine has reached significant levels - today only 80 per cent of parents have their child inoculated compared with over 90 per cent five years ago - and this in turn has prompted a tailspin from the Government. In a heavy-handed action on Friday it imposed a ban on importing the single measles and rubella vaccines to ensure that these pushy parents are stopped from exercising any choice, any control and any involvement in their child's well-being.

In a post-BSE society, where the public are bound to be suspicious of Government reassurances, it is almost breathtaking that New Labour's health officials would bring about a situation where some children will receive no vaccination against measles at all, rather than allow a small proportion of parents to step out of line and defy their mass-immunisation programme. Furthermore, they continue to appear hell-bent on shouting down the voices of these parents, as the head of the BMA's committee on doctor-patient relationships did on yesterday's Today programme - revealing that beneath all the guff about patient choice the old "doctor knows best" attitude still persists. What is needed is an open-minded attempt to deal with the outstanding questions about the cocktail nature of the MMR mix and the unsatisfactory system of reporting adverse reactions. Yet instead of that, the Government prefers to slip through a ban without proper explanation, on the supposition that if parents will not blindly accept that the triple vaccine is safe, then they must be bullied into accepting it.

Of course, rich patients still can - and no doubt will - travel to France, to places like the Hertford British Hospital just outside Paris, where their children can receive the vaccines separately. But what of all those parents who haven't the knowledge or the resources to pursue a similar course? To resolve this situation, the Government would have to do the unthinkable, and arrange properly funded research, openly and publicly recorded, to deal with all the parental anxieties this vaccination continues to cause. Is that really too much to ask?