conversation with James O'Brien.

It is three minutes after ten and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC, where we're going to turn our attention today to a story that in many ways

symbolises an awful lot of the things that we talk about regularly on the program and which I think you could be forgiven for filing under my sort of obsessions or hobby horses.

The MMR vaccine, the news coverage of it, the fake news responses to it,

the bad actors and appalling individuals who've kind of piggybacked it to, well, to do what?

I don't know, to secure some sort of dubious celebrity, to sow division among experts, to set people against

professionals, all of these things are very much themes of our era.

And yet when I tell you that over half a million people, children in this country, are now

unvaccinated against a particularly horrible disease that had almost been eradicated.

I think you'll understand the urgency.

Half a million children haven't had the measles jab. And do you know, I think part of the problem here is that even I, and I don't mean that in an arrogant way.

I'd like to think I'm always very open and honest when I'm being arrogant. I'm not currently being arrogant. When I say even I, I mean somebody who rails furiously against the absurdities of false equivalence on a regular basis. But I hope you find this interesting. This is sort of how our business works.

Even I have in the back of my mind somewhere a voice that says,

oh yes, but on the other hand, do you see what I mean?

And when I started doing this job or during the course of me doing this job,

the Daily Mail came out against MMR vaccines.

Before the Daily Mail went completely toxic.

And when you see stuff like that, you kind of think, well, then we must reflect both sides.

There's a former presenter on this program who got into awful trouble by essentially arguing the anti-MMR position or the anti-science

position or the anti-facts and evidence position. This is many, many years ago, just to give you

an idea of the scale of the story. And I had some sympathy for them at the time because I felt

that we were being paid sometimes to reflect both sides of a debate.

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