THIS week I was filling in the annual yellow slips my children bring home in vaccination season. The time of year when flu is on the rise, and I feel eternally grateful that we live in a country where healthcare is free, and a simple nasal spray vaccination is offered at the school to help protect my children over winter.

As I was filling in the form, I noticed a box. The writing beside it asked extensive questions about any allergies my children might have. Thankfully my children have none, but it’s the first time I’ve considered how some children may not be able to access this beneficial healthcare intervention, which got me thinking: my children have a role to play in keeping those allergic to vaccines safe from harm. If my children didn’t receive the immunisation, not only would they be at risk, but potentially other children without access to that safety net.

My children have been fully immunised, but I’d never before considered the role my decision to vaccinate them would have on public health generally. As parents, we are so focused on raising our own children that we tend not to think much further than the boundaries of our own families.

The chickens are coming home to roost for the anti-vaxxers, with 41,000 incidences of measles in Europe alone in the first six months of 2017. The numbers worldwide are skyrocketing, two decades after Andrew Wakefield was struck off, for fraudulently authoring a paper that linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Despite the paper’s fabricated claims, the damage to public health was done. The seeds of doubt planted so long ago have borne tragic fruits: the preventable deaths of children.

For those of us who feel fortunate to live at a time when modern medicine has all but eradicated the illnesses that claimed so many young lives just a century ago, the decision not to vaccinate seems selfish and reckless. When the price is so very high, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would knowingly choose it or how they could wilfully disconnect their personal decision from the public consequences. A recent study suggests those who opt out have a different moral makeup, prizing liberty, medical freedom and purity above an obligation to fairness or to reduce harm to their child and others. Given that these last two points are what much of the public health messaging centres around, it makes sense that the messages about the necessity of vaccination aren’t getting through: they don’t ring at the same resonant frequency for those who have their doubts.

The oily problem of the anti-vaccine movement is that it’s about far more than vaccines themselves. The movement is emblematic of a worldview where modern medicine itself is regarded conspiratorially and with ardent scepticism. If it weren’t inoculation, it would be something other than Big Pharma threatening the autonomy, liberty and purity of those predisposed to those moral values.

Dr Benjamin Mazer of Yale argues that the medical profession must decide whether it wants to tackle the tool or the ideology because each strategy has its risks and its benefits. Clearly the doctors and health professionals are best placed to lead the vanguard against fallacious and inaccurate claims of the ‘vaccine choice’ proponents. There will always be a vital role to play in combating vaccine panic for those who can oppose the arguments with robust counterpoints and medical facts.

Much like each of us has a role to play in protecting other people’s children when we choose to vaccinate our own, those of us who care enough should take up the mantle and fight this destructive ideology. A two-pronged approach is better than relying on the medical profession fighting this issue alone. We all have a part to play in closing the immunisation gap.

As parents, not doctors, we have an inherent advantage in that we have a shared interest in doing the best by our children, however we define that. We have more credibility with our peers than figures of authority. We can potentially use that for the public good. Perhaps now is the time for us in the pro-vaccine camp to not take immunisation for granted, and to take on the battle for better public health ourselves.

One parent’s decision not to vaccinate should not be a sentence to another child. Having the ability to protect against potentially deadly illness is a great privilege. Those of us who value that intervention must defend it, lest we lose more lives to this senseless cultural warfare.