The grim reaper has swapped his scythe for a stethoscope and is on a bloody tour of duty in Bangladesh, where the measles outbreak has claimed the lives of hundreds of children in just a matter of months. One can almost hear the collective sharp intake of breath from Whitehall mandarins, who are now jabbing at their spreadsheets and muttering about “vaccine hesitancy” like a baker blaming a fallen soufflé on the flour. The truth, dear reader, is far less palatable: we are watching a disease, once vanquished by science, saunter back into the playground because we have grown bored of our own success.
Bangladesh, a nation that has done more with less than Britain could manage with a lottery win, is now the stage for a tragic theatre of preventable death. Meanwhile, in the green and pleasant land of the UK, the vaccine drive is under pressure. Pressure from what? From the kind of people who read one article on homeopathy and suddenly think a vitamin C drip can cure a bullet wound. But let us not point fingers too hastily: the anti-vaxxers are merely the bat-shit-crazy wing of a larger malaise, a complacency that has settled over the public like a damp duvet.
Consider the numbers: hundreds of children dead. Not hypothetical children, not statistics on a spreadsheet, but tiny, breathing humans who will never grow up to invent a better cure for measles because they are already in the ground. And what does our government do? It runs a PR campaign. “Get vaccinated,” they say, as if the problem were a lack of awareness rather than a surfeit of idiocy. But idiocy, my friends, is a renewable resource, and it is currently powering a pandemic of its own.
The real tragedy is that this was utterly, grindingly predictable. Measles is a spiteful little virus: it loves a crowd, adores an unvaccinated host, and finds particular joy in the lungs of a child who had the temerity to be born to parents who read too many blog posts. And so the bodies pile up, and the news cycle spins, and in six months time we will have forgotten this outrage, replaced by another crisis, another pitiful plea for common sense that will go unheeded.
But wait, there is a glimmer of dark comedy here. For in the UK, the same people who refuse to vaccinate their own children are now writing furious letters to their MPs, demanding to know why the government isn’t “doing something” about this foreign disease. The sheer, bawdy contradiction of it all would make a satirist weep with joy if he weren’t so busy weeping with rage. They want border controls against measles, as if the virus carries a passport. They want travel bans, as if geography can outrun a pathogen that has already written the tickets to every corner of the globe.
And so we arrive at the core of this madness: a profound failure of imagination. We cannot imagine that a disease we thought conquered can return. We cannot imagine that the price of liberty is a lifelong subscription to vaccination. We cannot imagine that the world is a single, sneezing organism, and that a sneeze in Dhaka can cause a cough in Croydon. But imagine it we must, for the alternative is to admit that we have learned nothing from history, which, as any drunken historian will tell you, is the only lesson history ever teaches.
The vaccine drive is under pressure, they say. But what is pressure, compared to the weight of a hundred small coffins? What is pressure, compared to the sound of a mother wailing in a language that needs no translation? The answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing. And yet we will continue to wring our hands and commission reports and form committees, all while the virus does its ancient, terrible work. It is a farce, a Greek tragedy written by monkeys with typewriters. And we are the audience, applauding because we think the screaming is part of the show.
