Dr Danny Chambers

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) on securing this important debate. It seems that every time I open my social media feed or emails, I am being sold some supplement or superfood to boost my immunity. We know that the most effective way of boosting our immunity is vaccination. Vaccines can achieve something even more extraordinary: they can actually eradicate diseases from the face of the earth. During the 20th century alone, we lost hundreds of millions of people to smallpox until it was eradicated in 1977. Rinderpest, a cattle disease, was wiped off the face of the Earth by vaccination—the second disease to be removed from our planet. Polio is on the brink of eradication. I recently spoke at a Winchester rotary event about polio eradication, organised by two of my constituents, Gillian Russell and Professor Kordo Saeed, both of whom contracted polio when they were children and have lifelong disabilities as a result. It is important to remind everyone that this is about preventing not just deaths, but disability and ill health that can last a lifetime. We saw the power of vaccination during the covid-19 pandemic. A century earlier, during the 1918 influenza outbreak, which killed 50 million people, there were no flu vaccines or antiviral treatments. There were not even antibiotics to treat the secondary infections. During covid, we initially had only the same blunt tools—isolation and restriction on gatherings—to try to control the disease, but then the vaccine came out. It saved a huge number of lives and gave us a route out of lockdown. We got back to seeing our families, socialising, going back to work, running our businesses and just living our lives. But there is a danger that vaccines can become a victim of their own success. We have become so unfamiliar with some diseases that we have forgotten how serious they really are. That is why falling childhood vaccination rates should particularly concern us. When politicians like Donald Trump and parties such as Reform platform anti-vaxxers, parents rightly become worried. They all want to do the best for their children, but when dangerous, provocative and downright false information is platformed, the truth is pushed further and further away from those looking for answers. Centuries ago, hospitals were filled with iron lungs for children with polio, and graveyards were filled with children under five years old who died from entirely preventable diseases. Vaccines have saved more lives than any other medical intervention in history. They are the closest thing that we have to a safety blanket from disease, and we must not allow dangerous and divisive figures online or in politics to drive people away from science and evidence-led healthcare. Science produces solutions, answers and evidence, but politicians and politics can determine whether they are trusted.