But it would be smarter to admit that there is no equality between emotional instincts, however intense, and science.In the MMR row, it is not the "medical establishment" that has behaved with arrogance. The arrogance has come from the handful of grieving parents who put their need for a heroic narrative above the public's health, from the lone doctor who pandered to their grief in defiance of the facts, and - most of all - from a sensationalist right-wing press who took them seriously.If a measles epidemic comes, they will have to answer for their actions. But against her - and because of people like her - there may soon be hundreds of mothers who have needlessly lost their child to measles.We could engage in a grisly Grief Olympics, with people hurling their damaged or dead children into the field to justify their competing claims. The MMR row showed once again how emotion and fear can steamroller scientific fact. Mothers of autistic children who blamed MMR for their children's plight were repeatedly wheeled into the news studios to attack the "medical establishment" and praise the "heroic" Dr Wakefield.
I saw one mother shout down an MMR defender on TV before being asked - softly, politely - if she knew anything about science "I don't need scientific qualifications I am a mother and I know my son," she replied. She was clearly distraught and looking for something - anything - that would turn her child's disability from being a meaningless twist of nature into a crusade for justice. Hundreds of thousands of parents agreed, relied on their gut - and buried their children as a result. If they had prevailed, those diseases would still be scything through our population today.We shouldn't feel smugly superior. They claimed germ theory was "unproven" and waved placards of the children "murdered" by the vaccines. They even said it defied (you guessed it) "common sense" to inject small children with a small amount of a disease to ensure their immunity against it. When the British government introduced compulsory vaccinations to eradicate diphtheria, polio and smallpox from this island in the 1860s, thousand of populist anti-vaccination leagues sprang up.
The result? They were all dead before the age of 40.The rise of modern medicine - the greatest achievement in human history - has been based on the destruction of common sense as a way of understanding illness, and its replacement with a commitment to rational, evidence-based study.Ever since modern medicine was born, there has always been a strong counter-movement claiming to defend The People and their innate wisdom from its supposedly cold and impersonal rationality. Before the 1750s, everybody relied on instinct, intuition and superstition - the things that prevented you from giving your child the MMR - to guide their health care All medicine was "alternative". Instead of arid studies, parents were prompted to fall back on their "common sense": in your gut, does it feel right to inject your baby with three vaccines at once? Similar appeals to non-rational instincts have also been behind the surging popularity of witchdoctor potions marketed as "alternative medicine".This softening of the brain can only happen if you wilfully suspend the lesson of the past three centuries of human progress. But there was a darker, less obvious trend revealed by the anti-MMR scandal: a populist contempt for basic science and evidence.During the MMR row, the British public were encouraged to be suspicious of a distant, arrogant "medical establishment". This evidence was waved away by much of the press as difficult and indigestible; they preferred to focus instead on brain-dead trivia such as whether Leo Blair was given the jab.There's an old, obvious lesson here about the press having - as Stanley Baldwin put it - "power without responsibility".
