Submitted by Bill Fernie
12th August 2026
There’s No Vaccine for Stupid – But We Should Be Grateful for the Ones We Have
There are some headlines that make you laugh.
And then there are headlines that make you wonder whether humanity has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
“There’s No Vaccine for Stupid” was the title of a recent article in The Bulwark, describing how two Republican senators in America managed to turn a scientific discussion about a possible risk during pregnancy into an accusation that Dr Anthony Fauci knew vaccines were causing miscarriages.
The problem was not a shortage of information.
It was a shortage of understanding.
And, rather wonderfully, a shortage of basic arithmetic.
The episode is a perfect example of how a scientific statement can be taken out of context, have its meaning turned upside down and then be presented to millions of people as a frightening revelation.
But there is something much more serious behind the joke.
Because I grew up in Britain when many of the diseases that we now regard as largely preventable were simply part of childhood.
I remember when these illnesses were normal
Mumps, measles, German measles and chickenpox were not exotic diseases from a history book.
They were illnesses children actually caught.
Scarlet fever was another familiar name.
Parents did not have Facebook groups where they could debate whether their children should be vaccinated. There was no YouTube influencer explaining that everything doctors told us was part of some enormous conspiracy.
There was simply the local doctor, the health visitor, the school and parents who generally wanted their children protected from serious disease.
And, of course, medicine was not perfect.
Vaccines are not perfect either.
No serious scientist should claim otherwise.
Vaccines can have side effects. Medical treatments can have risks. Doctors sometimes get things wrong. Scientific understanding changes as new evidence arrives.
That is precisely why science works by asking questions, testing evidence and changing its conclusions when the evidence demands it.
That is not a weakness.
It is the whole point.
The curious case of the dangerous number
The Fauci controversy illustrates something much bigger than vaccines.
It illustrates the extraordinary power of a number when nobody stops to ask what the number actually means.
Imagine a scientist saying:
“We have noticed something that might be important. We don't know whether it is significant yet, so let's investigate.”
That is science.
Now imagine somebody repeating it as:
“Scientists knew something terrible was happening and tried to hide it.”
That is politics.
Then put the story on social media.
Add a dramatic photograph.
Put the words “80%” in enormous letters.
And suddenly you have a scandal.
The actual meaning of the statistic becomes almost irrelevant.
We live in an age when a percentage can be made to frighten people before anybody has explained what it is a percentage of.
Welcome to the Department of Statistical Misinterpretation
Perhaps governments should establish a new public body.
The Department of Statistical Misinterpretation.
Its job would be to help politicians understand numbers.
Its first handbook might contain five simple rules.
Rule One: Never explain the denominator.
If you tell people that something increased by 50 per cent, they may be impressed.
If you tell them it increased from two people to three, the excitement tends to disappear.
Rule Two: A large percentage sounds better than a large number.
“Three people” is not particularly frightening.
“An increase of 300 per cent” sounds like the end of civilisation.
Rule Three: If the evidence is complicated, simplify it until it becomes wrong.
Science may require six pages of explanation.
Social media requires six words.
Rule Four: If somebody says your statistics are wrong, accuse them of hiding something.
This is particularly useful in politics.
Rule Five: Never let uncertainty get in the way of a good headline.
Scientists saying “we don't yet know” is apparently considered terribly disappointing.
Politicians saying “I have uncovered the truth” is much more marketable.
My generation knew something younger generations can easily forget
There is an irony about successful vaccination.
When vaccination works, people stop seeing the disease.
And when people stop seeing the disease, they can begin to wonder why the vaccine is necessary.
That is rather like deciding that fire brigades are unnecessary because you have not seen your house burn down recently.
The success of vaccination can therefore create the conditions for people to forget why vaccination was introduced in the first place.
And that is where memory matters.
For people of my generation, diseases such as measles and mumps were not theoretical possibilities.
They were things children got.
The NHS describes measles as highly infectious and capable of causing serious complications. Yet vaccination has made it possible for most of us to go through life without seeing the disease in anything like the way previous generations did.
That success is extraordinary.
It is also easy to take for granted.
And now measles is coming back
There is a particularly uncomfortable twist to this story.
Britain is currently seeing measles cases rise again.
Recent figures for England show hundreds of confirmed cases during 2026, with children making up a large proportion of those affected. Vaccination coverage has fallen to levels that make outbreaks much easier to sustain.
So while politicians in America argue about what somebody wrote in an old email, the real world is quietly providing us with a reminder of what happens when protection against infectious diseases starts to weaken.
This is not about being left-wing or right-wing.
It is not about trusting every politician.
It is not about believing every pharmaceutical company is wonderful.
And it certainly isn't about pretending that vaccines carry zero risk.
It is about something much simpler.
Evidence matters.
The anti-vaxxer paradox
There is a delicious paradox in the anti-vaccination movement.
People are understandably suspicious of powerful institutions.
They are told not to trust governments.
They are told not to trust scientists.
They are told not to trust pharmaceutical companies.
Fair enough.
But then they are sometimes asked to trust an anonymous Facebook post, a YouTube personality with no medical training or a politician who has suddenly discovered a statistic that appears to prove everything they already believed.
That seems a rather strange way of applying scepticism.
If we are going to question experts, perhaps we should question everybody else too.
Including the person selling us the conspiracy theory.
Perhaps we need a new vaccination campaign
Forget the injection.
I have a better idea.
We launch a national campaign called:
“Have You Checked What the Number Means?”
Every politician appearing on television would have to carry a little warning label.
CAUTION: STATISTIC MAY HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM CONTEXT.
Social media posts would carry another:
WARNING: THIS PERCENTAGE MAY HAVE ESCAPED FROM ITS DENOMINATOR.
And before anybody was allowed to become a political commentator, they would have to pass a short examination.
Question one:
If something rises from 1 to 2, what percentage increase is that?
Question two:
Does correlation prove causation?
Question three:
What is the difference between a possibility, a risk and an observed event?
Question four:
Have you actually read the study you are talking about?
Anyone failing all four would immediately be appointed to a television news panel.
We shouldn't be frightened of science
There is nothing wrong with asking difficult questions about vaccines.
In fact, we should encourage it.
Medicine should be scrutinised.
Scientists should be challenged.
Government decisions should be examined.
Pharmaceutical companies should be held accountable.
But there is a world of difference between asking legitimate questions and deliberately turning scientific uncertainty into political misinformation.
The answer to bad science is better science.
The answer to a questionable statistic is better statistics.
The answer to a politician misrepresenting evidence is to explain the evidence.
And perhaps the answer to some of the more extraordinary claims circulating online is simply to ask:
“Hang on. What does that number actually mean?”
My generation got something rather valuable
I have had vaccinations throughout my life.
I have benefited from medical advances that previous generations could only have dreamed about.
And perhaps that is the great irony.
The generation that grew up surrounded by infectious diseases has often become the generation least likely to see them because vaccination helped push them into the background.
That is success.
But success can have an unfortunate side effect.
People forget what failure looked like.
So perhaps the best argument for vaccination isn't a political argument at all.
It is memory.
Remember what measles looked like.
Remember what mumps meant.
Remember children being ill for days and sometimes much worse.
Remember that medicine did not always have the tools it has today.
And remember that the reason many of us can now look back on these diseases as childhood memories rather than everyday threats is because somebody, somewhere, developed a vaccine.
There may be no vaccine for stupid.
But there is a remarkably effective treatment for ignorance.
Learning.
And unlike some vaccines, there is no upper age limit.
All you have to do is be willing to take the first dose.
Note
It is hard to recall all the vaccinations I have had in my life and which ones save my life or stopped me becoming very ill and now in my late 70s I read constantly the many posting about how they affect people and how bad they might be. However many of the people posting on social media about vaccinations did not see as I have done the harm to people who never had a vaccination for polio and their damage arm or leg - many classes when I was young had a polio victim in the class and vaccinations all but wiped the disease out in this country. Stupidity does not save lives.
Bill Fernie - Retired but not too stupid quite yet......
The article that got me thinking on Bulwark
For those you who want to follow more about American politics this is good place to start. They question a lot especially about the Trump administration.