Measles outbreak and MMR vaccinations: live webchat with Department of Health director of immunisation Professor David Salisbury, Tuesday 9 April, 2-3pm

[GeraldineMumsnet]

In light of the measles outbreaks in South Wales and higher than average levels of measles in some areas of England, and concerns reflected in MNers' discussions, we've invited Professor David Salisbury, the government's director of immunisation, back to MN to be our webchat guest tomorrow, Tuesday 9 April, at 2pm.

Please post any questions you have about the MMR vaccine for your children, or yourself, to Professor Salisbury.

Thank you.

I think the fact mumsnet has a voice might be the problem Sim. Unless they really are as incompetent as they make out on this thread. Let's hope vaccines posts describing her family's story are reinstated. It doesn't look very good if they aren't as they most definitely did not break talk guidelines.

I think failing to reinstate the posts where vaccines identified herself as a Lancet mother & was mildly critical of David Salisbury (for being too busy to meet her years ago) is only going to fuel conspiracy theories though.

They have had all night to re-read, think and reinstate. If they reinstate now it is more because of strenuous complaint than because the person/people on duty think they should be reinstated (if the person on duty thought that they should be reinstated, they already would be).

How anyone could think it right to reverse the decision on all the links and yet NOT reinstate the posts which told Vaccines' personal story of having a child who is vaccine damaged is beyond me. Especially since there is a long history of trying to silence the parents of the Lancet 12.

This is no longer the site for me. Stifling (apparently) unpalatable experiences is not what MN is supposed to be about.

Shame on you MNHQ.

There is a fundamental issue here which is that governments don't believe ordinary people can be trusted with real information about vaccines, thus (to cite a relatively simple example) "the plain language summary" of the Cochrane Review of MMR doesn't repeat the statement in the abstract that safety studies are "largely inadequate". There is huge pressure on journalists now not to report anything which damages the public reputation of vaccines. The result is that there is no pressure to make sure that vaccines are safe, and huge animosity, even hate campaigns, against anyone who steps out of line or speaks up when it does go wrong. The exclusion here of one of the parents from 1998 Wakefield paper is a case in point. Last year it was established in the High Court with the exoneration of the senior author and lead clinician of that paper, Prof John Walker-Smith, that there was an awful lot right with it - but people are still talking as if everything they were told about it in the years from 2004 to 2012 was true.

Bland and useless official commentary from guest expert and over moderation and clear bending to pressure from the site's owners. Despite the slightly giggly and self-effacing "oh it was a knee-jerk reaction, silly us" the knee-jerk hasn't been rectified. Why not?

I for one would like to read the Lancet mother's entire posts particularly the one with her story.

This is an edifying thread, unfortunately not in the way intended I'm sure

I think this whole thread can be summed up as:

Mumsnetter: "I have a question about the MM..."
Official la la I'm not listening type person: "MMR vaccination required"
Mumsnetter: "But what abou.."
Official la la I'm not listening type person: "MMR vaccination required"
Mumsnetter: "My child ha.."
Official la la I'm not listening type person: "MMR vaccination required"
Mumsnetter: "I'm concerned abou..."
Official la la I'm not listening type person: "MMR vaccination required"
Mumsnetter: "Should I be worried about the ..."
Official la la I'm not listening type person: "MMR vaccination required"

This is hideous.

A controversial public figure is given a platform on a massive well known website to answer questions about a controversial subject and we are expected to be totally uncritical of him and the government decisions and policy he represents. Even if we have been adversely affected by such decisions and policies.

Oookkaaaay Mumsnet

I have never really been able to get the point of these webchats TBH. If it is a non-controversial figure like a writer or an actor then I guess they are sort of fun but this is just a public relations exercise to repeat the 'MMR is safe, vaccinate and don't ask questions' mantra that the government has been parroting since the Urabe fiasco.

Well I'm not a nodding dog and I will not support the censoring of parents and the uncritical platform that it appears we must offer Professor Salisbury.

Vaccines - I support you, the parents of the other Lancet children and all the other families around the world who are dealing with the consequences of the triple MMR vaccine.

I believe you 100% and I want to hear your story. Indeed in the interests of truth and parents supporting parents which is the ethos of this site IIRC I would like for you to be invited to do a webchat.

I for one would find it much more interesting than having government policy parroted at me in dumbed down language.

Like saintly, I will have to leave MN if this matter isn't cleared up. I don't want to give traffic to a website I'm ashamed of the politics and priorities of.

Agree with everything Beachcomber said. I want to hear what Vaccines has to say. ot nod along uncritically to the party line with Mister Avoidy-answers.

The question that I would have asked Professor Salisbury would have been;

Is there evidence that the measles virus is mutating and that the vaccine is becoming less relevant - is this why we have heard of entire classes of children coming down with measles in Swansea, regardless of their vaccine status? If that is the case do you think that panic talk about 'only a matter of time before there is a death', and pushing people to get a triple vaccine with a rocky safety record is responsible, or would it be much more reasonable public health policy to offer the single measles vaccine?

But I didn't bother to ask it.

regardless of their vaccine status

that is not the case. According to the PHW (more precise numbers to be published, hopefully soon), infection seen is consistent with vaccine efficiencies of 90% for 1x MMR and 99% for 2x MMR. That in turn is consistent with everything else we see in outbreaks in the developed world, even in familial = extra intensive contacts, 2x MMR has an > 95% efficiency.

Are mnet going to.put back vaccines posts about her story?

Are they going to.come back and answer the questions being asked?

This thread has moved out of the 'sticky' threads at the top of the page now, are mnhq hoping it just falls out of active conversations and gets forgotten about?!

Can't quite believe they have reinstated all but one of Vaccines posts.

Shame on you MN.

Hi Mumsnet,

Just wanted to say thank you very much for organising this webchat, I found it tremendously helpful - I didn't ask a question because I could see someone else had already asked the question I wanted to ask, which was one of the ones David Salisbury was able to answer in the time he had. This has saved me from a lot of unnecessary worry and stress - thank you!

Still no proper response MNHQ? Your email suggested it shouldn't take too long to be sorted.

@saintlyjimjams

Still no proper response MNHQ? Your email suggested it shouldn't take too long to be sorted.

Hello hello. Sorry it's taking us so long. Nearly there!

I am grateful for this webchat too, living where I do. And given that the theme was the current outbreak I think that there was plenty of helpful information given. I also agree with Justine that some responses towards Dr Salisbury were rude, especially given that he is presumably a busy man and took the time to talk to us.

So thank you to MNHQ and thank you to Dr Salisbury

Yes, it is interesting that the official figures correspond to exactly what would be expected isn't it CatherinaJTV?

My experience is that the main criteria doctors use to diagnose childhood disease is vaccination status.

When my DD1 was younger, she and a child she went to a childminders with, both came down with what appeared to be rubella within a week or so of each other. Both children were taken to the doctor - my DD who hadn't had MMR was diagnosed as having rubella, her little friend who had recently had MMR was diagnosed as having a non-specific virus. The other mother insisted on having her son tested (as I was pregnant at the time) and it turned out it was rubella. (BTW the vaccinated child became ill first so it would appear that not only did the vaccine fail but it may even have contributed. That or it was just a massive coincidence that he came down with rubella shortly after having a rubella vaccine and when there did not appear to be any other cases in our local environment.)

Seeing as Mumsnet have built their success around the women who have posted here over the years and given so much of their time to building the MN brand for so long [the intelligent woman/parent brand, as far as I remember] it seems acutely disrespectful of MNHQ to have behaved the way they have on this thread, presumably as a result of pressure from Salisbury's PR team.

I get it, I really do, the need to have maximum vaccination coverage to avoid more measles fatalities. But to silence people who have another story to tell just fosters and feeds the distrust. Public Health officials in the UK seem to originate from the same breed, peculiarly contemptuous of the general public and unable to engage in subtle or complex debate.

I think this thread is a great example of conspiracy theories run amok.

You don't think Lancet mother has a right to tell her story?

Right.

Apols for the delay in posting properly this morning.

Just for clarity, am going to try to sum up what happened with the deletions - which will mean I repeat much of what was said yesterday by RebeccaMN and JustineMN but I think it's probably better to have it all in one place (so please forgive me if you've read some of this before).

OK, so first off, Mumsnet webchats have slightly different guidelines to regular Talk threads. We do particularly ask folks to be civil/polite to our guests and we tend to delete posts that aren't civil/polite pretty promptly. A couple of posts were deleted during the chat for those reasons - although, as JustineMN posted, when we were asked about the deletion, we misquoted the deleted post. We have apologised for that - and do so again here.

Moving on to the other deletions last night...

We have a general rule across all our Talk boards, as we hope you all know (as it's in our general Talk Guidelines), that we will delete posts that link to blogs/articles/sites/retail 'opportunities' in a deliberately spammy way.

We do this because these posts tend to interrupt discussions and are often off-topic - and annoy the hell out of our regular posters. They also, understandably, annoy folks who have paid to advertise with us - and then see "chancers" cheekily trying to promote themselves for free.

Last night, both Vaccines' posts and soulsurviver's posts were seen by the MNHQer on duty as this kind of spam - because they contained so many links. And also because, in Vaccines' case, they were her first and only posts on MN and, in soulsurviver's case, we'd already deleted him for spamming (about debt control, as it happens) in the past.

As we subsequently posted last night, we made a mistake in Vaccines' case.

It was clear, in hindsight, that though Vaccines had only just joined and her posts did look, at first glance, to be spammy because of the proliferation of links, she was genuinely joining in the discussion.

We should not have deleted all her posts.

They have now all been reinstated (I hope - please let us know if we've missed any), with the exception of one which was, in our view, not civil/polite towards our webchat guest.

We are sorry for all this - particularly as, given the controversy and high emotions of the debate and the fact that we didn't post straightaway to explain why we were deleting the posts, it may well have looked to some as though we were censoring the discussion in some kind of rabid "pro-vaccine" way.

This couldn't be further from the truth. We're not in the business of censoring discussions, as we hope you all know. It was, truly, definitely a case of cock-up rather than conspiracy.

We hope that's all a bit clearer.

@hawthornthree

Seeing as Mumsnet have built their success around the women who have posted here over the years and given so much of their time to building the MN brand for so long [the intelligent woman/parent brand, as far as I remember] it seems acutely disrespectful of MNHQ to have behaved the way they have on this thread, presumably as a result of pressure from Salisbury's PR team.

I get it, I really do, the need to have maximum vaccination coverage to avoid more measles fatalities. But to silence people who have another story to tell just fosters and feeds the distrust. Public Health officials in the UK seem to originate from the same breed, peculiarly contemptuous of the general public and unable to engage in subtle or complex debate.

We can categorically state that we have had absolutely no pressure about anything on this thread from Salisbury's PR team. In fact, I'm not even sure he has a PR team, as such.

That one post told her story. Could edit out the 'not polite bit' leaving her story.

Tho tbh I thought it was fine as it was.

@5madthings

That one post told her story. Could edit out the 'not polite bit' leaving her story.

Tho tbh I thought it was fine as it was.

No, the post telling her story has been reinstated.