I have just started reading Vaxxers. It is a brilliant book that tackles the anxiety that surrounds the rollout of the Covid vaccine programme. How do I know it is brilliant if I have only just started it? Well, it was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and, having listened to over an hour of readings adapted for radio I just knew I had to read the whole thing. And the first few chapters have confirmed my initial positive impression.

And it is a necessary book. As the authors point out, apart from the fact that most of us don’t like needles, “Perhaps it is that, whereas most medicine is given to someone who is already ill and makes them better, vaccines are given to people who are healthy, to prevent something that might never happen.” Part of their intention is to answer important questions like, “What is a vaccine and why do we need them? How do they work? How has it been possible to make them so fast? What is in them? How do we know there are safe?” Dr Green recounts a chance encounter with a vaccine anxious parent at a camp site.

I have been dealing with similar questions for many years in relation to fears that vaccines might cause autism. In fact my very first blog was written about this mistaken belief and the misguided efforts to cure autism with unproven diets, drugs and treatments. As a result I got to know doctors, scientists and concerned parents like myself trying to navigate past the bad science and bad medicine that often topped the Google searches on autism, and to share my journey with other parents through my blog. I learned a lot about science but also a lot about the pressures on parents who were made to feel guilty for choosing to vaccinate their children and therefore vulnerable to the moral blackmail to pay good money for bad medicine to undo the harm they mistakenly believed they had caused to their children.

And it was not just the internet. Our national media gave full coverage to the scare stories. The BBC, in the interests of balance, would set up a respected scientist against an anti-vaxx campaigner, implying that both viewpoints were equally valid. The press showed no such restraint. Screaming headlines dominated, usually with a short paragraph at the end in which a scientist would say the evidence was not conclusive. It will come as no surprise that the Mail and the Telegraph were the worst offenders. But even the Observer got in on the act. I am only glad that we managed to out blog them. Gawd knows what might have happened if we’d had Twitter and FaceBook and the rest of the social media to contend with. But now I see familiar names and familiar arguments cropping up in my feeds. Only this time it is in relation to Covid and not MMR and autism.

This time it is not guilt but fear and doubt that motivates people to listen to the anti-Vaxxers. It does not help that we have a government that has so mismanaged every other aspect of the pandemic, fuelling mistrust and cynicism about its motives. So when it seized on the success of the vaccine programme as its get-out-of-jail-free card, with the enthusiastic support of the media, including those erstwhile anti-vaxxers at the Daily Mail, this only fed into people’s existing doubts and fears.

So I welcome Vaxxers. Scientists need to come forward and tell their stories. Thank you to Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green for being among the first to do so. And thank you to Deborah Crewe, their editor, who, in the authors own words, “turned our musings and jottings into a book.” It is a book I can recommend without hesitation.