Any child's death from whooping cough is a preventable scandal. Vaccination is vital

That a single fatality in Scotland from any of them today would hit the headlines is testimony to the effectiveness of vaccination. It is the only preventive measure against them that works.

So any shortfall in vaccine uptake is likely to have consequences. Whooping cough is proving the point. Vaccine uptake has recently fallen in Scotland, and the causative bacterium is taking advantage of the resultant decline in immunity against it.

So far this year, 5,026 cases have been recorded, many more than in the last good year for the bacterium, 2012, when there were 1,896 during  the whole year. So far in Scotland we have been lucky. No babies have died from it.

But relying on luck as a preventative won't do. Exhortations to get children vaccinated must be heeded, and pregnant women should take advantage of the vaccination programme that protects their babies.

Infants are most at risk from the bacterium, which can spread much more easily in an unvaccinated family than Covid. Whenever tragedy strikes, an almost universal response is to ask whether it could have been prevented.

For a case of whooping cough with its distressing symptoms, never mind a lethal outcome, the answer is, of course, yes. So such events are by any ethical standards a scandal. That is why anti-vaxxers should hold their heads in shame.

The description of them by Sheldon Dudley, medical director-general of the Royal Navy, a diphtheria vaccine pioneer and organiser of the very successful hospital ships on D-Day, has never been bettered: "While they often seem to be absolutely unscrupulous and dishonest, really they are only completely inaccessible to logic, making the most absurd accusations against those who dare to differ from them.” Don't blame social media. He wrote this in 1929.

As a virologist who has researched smallpox and influenza vaccines, it could be said that I have a vested interest in pointing out the successful development of such life-saving products.

Neverthless, I have attended the post-mortems of cases of measles and influenza in previously healthy but unimmunized young people. But my wholehearted endorsement goes much further. It is personal.

Many years ago I worked on the smallpox virus in a laboratory where the only protection against a potentially lethal  infection was by vaccination. My trust in it was not misplaced. 

Last year I caught Covid after visiting a hospital ward during an outbreak. Being of a certain age, it laid me low. But I was only hospitalised for five days, and made a full recovery.

My vaccine booster immunity had been waning. But there was enough of it to prevent me ending up on the mortuary slab. My experience illustrates an important principle.

Vaccine programmes take waning immunity into account. It happens with the whooping cough vaccine. When a parent is advised that the time has come for it to be repeated, go!

Hugh Pennington is emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Aberdeen