On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler 'died after MMR jab' (Metro), 'Healthy' baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now.
On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child's death. So far, of the papers above, only the Telegraph has had the decency to cover the outcome. The Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro have all decided that their readers are better off not knowing. Tick, tock.
Does it stop there? No. Amateur physicians have long enjoyed speculating that MMR and other vaccinations are somehow "harmful to the immune system" and responsible for the rise in conditions such as asthma and hay fever. Doubtless they must have been waiting some time for evidence to appear.
As a head of state, to end up in a slick French hospital on your deathbed has to be the ultimate vote of no confidence in your own country's healthcare system. Zambia's Levy Mwanawasa was shipped off to Paris after his stroke in June this year. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria's president, also popped over to France for surgery on a stomach ulcer.At least North Korea's Kim Jong-Il was suitably taken in by the cult of his own personality to stay at home for treatment after his recent brush with the other side. But rumour has it that a French neurosurgeon was imported to treat him. Pyongyang denies this emphatically, but then they would, wouldn't they?What is it about the French and their medical prowess?The point, Jacob Zuma, is that we don't need pious school leavers; we need ones who are developing razor-keen skills so that they can keep this country on the road to modernity. I'd like some of them to become super-healers, the kinds of doctors, nurses and medical researchers who are so good at what they do that the ruling party won't have to suffer the indignity of sending its ailing leaders off to the hospitals of former colonisers to get decent medical treatment. So let's leave the teachers to do their jobs -- teach -- and spare them the distraction of daily incantations.Zuma's comments to religious leaders at a meeting outside Polokwane last week were historically myopic: let's yank South Africa's flagging morals up by the bootstraps, he said, by instilling the fear of God in us through daily prayer at school, "as it was in the past".Half a sec? As I recall, the same administration that used to make us pray in school "in the past" was somewhat morally ambiguous regarding how it treated any darker-toned people living under its rule. There were a lot of people suffering mysterious injuries in the showers and stairwells at John Vorster Square because of the National Party's moral uprightness.
