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The race for a Covid vaccine is on - but the 'anti-vax' background noise is only
                                 getting louder

   As a volunteer on the Oxford trials suffers an 'unexplained illness',
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   Sadly, my driver is not unique in his views. According to a poll of
   5,000 people last month by childcare.co.uk, almost half of all parents
   insisted they would not vaccinate their child if and when a vaccine
   became available. Eighty-six per cent of these “anti-vaxxers” said the
   vaccine would be unsafe with “nasty” side-effects: a fifth thought
   Covid-19 “doesn’t really exist.”

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   that would be investigated in an independent review to maintain the
   integrity of the work. The trial has now resumed.

   The anti-vax statistics are pretty troubling, even hypothetically. But
   the problem is that soon, they may not just be theory. Last Monday,
   Matt Hancock raised hopes that a Coronavirus vaccine was “likely to
   come” in the first few months of 2021. He revealed that the UK was
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   been made public.”

   While the world strains to find a manufactured solution to “beat” the
   virus, there is the background noise of the “anti-vaxxers”. These are
   the people who are against inoculations - and are particularly against
   vaccinating their own children: who think vaccines cause autism, that
   politicians are scare-mongering about the disease to drum up profits
   for drug companies, and that Bill Gates will be using injections to
   plant microchips into their children. Piers Corbyn (brother of Jeremy)
   and Novak Djokovic are famous anti-vaxxers.

   Piers Corbyn is an outspoken anti-vaxxer

   Piers Corbyn is an outspoken anti-vaxxer Credit: Victoria Jones/PA

   This movement started with gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, the
   lead author of a 1998 Lancet study purporting to show a link between
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   deaths.

   Despite their denunciation, Wakefield”s “findings” gave birth to the
   “anti-vax” movement. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate calculates
   that 58 million people follow conspiracy-theory accounts on social
   media.

   The World Health Organisation cares so much about the anti-vaxxers that
   it has published a 44-page document for medical professionals called
   “How To Respond to Vocal Vaccine Deniers in Public.” It makes a
   distinction between “vaccine refusers” and “vaccine deniers”. The
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   groups find sympathetic like-minded ears - pours oil on the deniers and
   refuseniks’ fires,” says Dr Smith. “This leads them to believe they
   must have a point, because hundreds of people, who don’t know any
   better, ‘like’ the garbage they are spouting. The anti-vaxxers are
   certainly part of the problem.”

   Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia,
   goes further. He calls the anti-vax movement “depressing” and
   “selfish”. “As a doctor I have known children die who would have
   survived if they had been vaccinated. The risks of vaccines have been
   maliciously overestimated.

   Let’s consider for a moment that the anti-vaxxers have a case. The
   American vaccination programme is rather impressively (some would say
   unnecessarily) called Operation Warp Speed. But there is a limit to how
   quickly a vaccine can safely be introduced. “Vaccines not only need to
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   Grandma might catch it from the youngsters, and she will just have a
   cold.”

   On the anti-vaxxers, Dr Smith has this to say: “if these people will
   take a gamble with their kids getting a potentially lethal disease like
   measles, why on earth will they give two hoots about Grandma?”