Читать книгу Helen's Story - Rosemary Fox - Страница 16
ОглавлениеBefore the debate in Parliament, there had been some media interest in our campaign and a number of parents had told the stories of the damage to their children. When details of the Parliamentary debate were published, however, the press interest increased and television producers also became interested.
Appearing on television was a novel experience for me and I was always surprised by the different approaches to the story of vaccine damage. Some producers were very interested in the story and wanted to allocate a long programme to go into the matter in detail. Some wanted a quick fill-in in a general health programme and some wanted a quick item in a news programme.
Taking part in the interviews invariably involved a lot of travelling. I can remember occasions when I had to drop everything to appear on a programme in London or Manchester or locally in Birmingham. At that time in the 1970s, there was more money available for the making of programmes and it was quite usual for a taxi to be sent from London to Shipston on Stour to take me down and bring me home – all in a matter of about five hours. The same was true of radio programmes, most of which were done from the Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham; if I agreed to travel there myself, a small cheque to cover my time and expenses would follow, or otherwise the studio would send a taxi. Apart from the convenience of all this, it meant that one could be quite sure that an interview had definitely been arranged and that the journey was not a waste of time.
Times have changed. On two occasions in the 1990s, I rushed to Birmingham to take part in what I was assured was an important interview, only to find subsequently that the journalist in question had decided to do something different, without feeling obliged to let me know. Since this can be a waste of time and also a costly exercise, such an attitude can be very annoying.
I was never comfortable in television interviews. Sitting under the glare of studio lights, with a camera staring at me, made me feel extremely tense. Television interviewers varied from programme to programme and, although most were helpful and courteous, some were difficult. I particularly remember one interviewer who, while taking me into a studio, asked me,‘Why are you looking for money now that the damage had been done?’ I sat speechless through the interview and afterwards asked him if he knew any disabled children or what the cost of their care was and whether, if anything happened to his children, he was in a position to provide care for life for them. He was upset at the comment about his own children but nevertheless failed to understand what I was talking about. I didn’t agree to be interviewed by him again.
Radio interviews, on the other hand, were quite different. A small studio was provided with a radio link to the programme in question and I could sit in comfort and alone, with headphones connecting me to the interviewer at the other end. These interviews flowed effortlessly.
The first programme to become interested in the campaign for vaccine-damaged children after Jack Ashley’s debate was This Week, a current affairs programme which went out nationally at the time. Initially, this was to be a programme about the campaign itself but, subsequently, the producers decided to make it a programme about compensation and they gathered up relevant information from me and from European sources. The programme went out on 4 April l974, entitled Public Safety – Private Risk:Vaccination, following a preview on 3 April to which Jack and Pauline Ashley, Dr John Wilson and I were invited.
The programme told the story of one of Dr Wilson’s patients, Keith Stokes, whose father Roy has since continued to fight for the rights of all vaccine-damaged children. At the time Keith was 11 years old and the programme showed the extent of his disability following a severe reaction to vaccination when a baby. To highlight the question of compensation, the programme also showed a child in Germany, also severely disabled following vaccination, and referred to the fact that, in Germany, vaccine-damaged children received an allowance of £100 a month, a sum which would be increased as the children got older.
The Medical Officer of Havant was interviewed and confirmed that he was getting reports from doctors and from hospitals about small children crying, screaming and having fits after vaccination. He had investigated, he said, and found that this was likely to happen when the triple vaccination which included whooping cough vaccine was used and less likely to happen after the double, which was diphtheria and tetanus only.
Dr Wilson referred to his own recently published study of children admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital with a severe illness within 24 hours of inoculation.
Dr Ehrengut, the German specialist who campaigned for the withdrawal of whooping cough vaccine in Germany, said he was quite convinced that whooping cough vaccinations should be stopped immediately because the number of vaccination victims equals at least, or even exceeds, the injuries due to the whooping cough disease itself.
Dr Ehrengut was head of Hamburg’s immunological services at the time and the programme-makers travelled to Hamburg to talk to the parents of Andreas Lonski, a child who suffered irreparable brain damage following a severe reaction to whooping cough vaccine. His damage was very obvious and made quite an impact on those watching the programme. The difference between his case and that of Keith Stokes was that compensation of £100 per month was paid to the Lonski family to help care for Andreas while Keith’s parents were left to bear the cost alone.
As Keith’s mother and father said,‘If compensation can be won because of his own right of being an individual having being born normally, and then damaged accidentally, irreparably, then we feel that this is a right that he is entitled to as a human being.’
The programme was powerful, but concentrating as it did on the damage suffered by Keith and Andreas, I felt that its effect would be to stop whooping cough vaccination without having much impact on the compensation issue, and I said as much in the discussion programme which followed. This opinion was not very well received by the programme reporter, Peter Williams, but it did, in fact, prove to be the case. The day following the programme, according to an item in Medical World, hundreds of doctors telephoned the Department of Health asking about the whooping cough vaccination programme and, in the following year or two, the acceptance rate for the vaccination fell drastically until it reached only 30% in some parts of the country.
Later on, and even to this day, all of us involved were accused of being responsible for the drop in acceptances for whooping cough vaccination, which it was said led to large-scale epidemics of the disease, with many deaths. This was an unfair accusation as it was quite clear from the health experts involved that there was disquiet about the vaccination, largely hidden from the public until then, and the question really was whether this was a morally acceptable way of proceeding with a health policy.
It was also an untrue accusation as a study of the figures of whooping cough cases and deaths resulting from them in the following years shows that although there was a reported increase in the incidence of the disease, there was little if any increase in the number of deaths. As one medical expert said, doctors tend to report whooping cough in every child with a severe cough who has not been vaccinated, and the higher reported incidence of the disease at the time when the acceptance rate for the vaccination was very low was most likely biased to some extent.
The This Week programme was the start of many similar programmes about whooping cough vaccination and vaccine-damaged children over the following years. It also was the start of discussions about vaccine damage in other countries, particularly in America and Australia.
An American television crew came over to do an in-depth interview similar to the This Week programme, and American parents then wrote to ask for details of our campaign. Later, they set up a group called Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT), the initials being taken from the diphtheria pertussis tetanus components of the triple vaccine. Campaigning continued in America until, with the help of Senator Edward Kennedy, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed some years later. Campaigning also continued in Australia but no special scheme for vaccine damage resulted. Australian authorities discussed instead following the example of New Zealand, which had introduced the first comprehensive ‘no fault’ compensation scheme in the world for personal injury by accident.
The 1974 Parliamentary debate and the This Week programme launched the campaign in this and other countries for State responsibility for damage resulting from vaccination. We had achieved a certain amount of success in raising the issue, and in stimulating a debate into the public arena, but there was still a great deal to do if our goals were to be achieved.
