UK benefit halt for MMR jab refuseniks

pharmafile | September 23, 2013 | News story | Sales and Marketing Labour, MMR, NHS, vaccination 

Under new plans by the British Labour Party welfare payments could be stopped in the future for parents who fail to inoculate their children against measles, mumps and rubella.

The proposal comes from the party’s policy review chief Jon Cruddas MP, who says that benefit claimants could be forced to give their children the MMR vaccination – or face losing their payouts.

“This is an example of the sort of measure which we want to see that ties public goods to how people behave as citizens,” a senior Labour Party source told the Times newspaper.

This all comes after a measles outbreak in Wales earlier this year where more than 1,000 people caught the disease in Swansea, leading to the death of one 25-year-old man. It is believed this could have been averted if uptake of the MMR jab had been higher in the region.

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The vaccination has become controversial in some parents’ eyes after the now discredited Lancet paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield in 1998 allegedly showed a connection between the inoculation and rates of autism.

The paper was heavily criticised in the academic world and later retracted by the Lancet journal, but there are still groups in the UK and the US especially who remain sceptical of the MMR treatment.

This new policy, should it be adopted by Labour and they get to power in the next general election, is an attempt to combat these types of outbreaks.

MMR inoculation is already mandatory in Australia and was set up by the former Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd earlier this year.

The MMR jab is given to children on the NHS in two doses: the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and a second booster dose, typically before a child goes to school between the ages of three and five years.

Sanofi Pasteur currently develops MMRvaxPro for the disease, whilst GSK makes Priorix.

Ben Adams 

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