As low uptake of jabs leads to measles outbreak… I’m proof you’re never too old to need the MMR

The first thing I should say is I’m fit and healthy at 64. Luckily as it turned out.

It started on a Tuesday in early August. I’d been working hard all day as a digital consultant and, coming home exhausted, went straight to bed.

Next morning, I was coughing and miserable with a temperature of 38c. I’d lost my sense of taste and smell but tested negative for Covid. The next day my temperature was higher, barely controlled with paracetamol.

By Friday it was up to 39c. I was racked with the worst cough I’ve ever experienced, and sneezing over and over again. I called 111, which told me to take paracetamol having asked a number of wholly irrelevant questions such as, was I bleeding?

I felt increasingly frightened as I was wheezing, for the first time in decades. So I staggered to the GP. Not a doctor who knows me, but a young man who asked no useful questions, had not a single idea, and sent me home with the same useless advice about paracetamol as NHS 111. I explained I’d never felt so ill, but my symptoms were dismissed as ‘just a virus’ and I was made to feel I was making a fuss about nothing.

Cue the weekend from hell. My temperature on Sunday soared to 40c — very high for an adult. I’d long since stopped eating; even drinking water was hard because the insides of my mouth and throat were very sore, bright red and peeling off.

I rang 111 again. Same boilerplate questions about heart attacks and strokes, but at least I was given a GP appointment for Monday.

Little frightening purple pinpricks had appeared all over my chest and cheeks. With meningitis in mind, I pressed a champagne glass against them, but couldn’t tell if they faded to white or not. By this time, I wasn’t thinking straight, drifting in and out of sleep.

On Monday, I found a mask left over from lockdown. Not knowing what was wrong with me, I tried to keep away from people. All I wanted to do was lie down on the cool floor but, by sheer force of will, I stayed upright.

I saw another unfamiliar GP, who wasn’t concerned, in spite of me showing him my rash. But I found the strength to insist he refer me to hospital, then stumbled outside and booked an Uber to A&E.

After about an hour, a nurse let me lie down in a side room — my temperature was nudging 40c and they immediately put me on a drip as I was so dehydrated.

One of the first questions they asked me was, have you been vaccinated for measles? I knew I hadn’t, as my brother (four years younger than me) was vaccinated at eight in 1970 but, for unknown reasons, I wasn’t.

My condition got steadily worse. By now my nose and reddened eyes were filled with what felt like hot gravel.

The purple pinpricks on my chest and face bloomed into a hot, red raised rash that crept down my body. My oxygen levels had dropped to 89 per cent (normal is 95 and above) so they tried to give me a nasal cannula. With the gravel up there it was agony, so I tore it out. The oxygen mask was only marginally more comfortable on my sore face.

Three days passed, and no one seemed to know what was wrong with me — all the blood tests and chest X-rays came back negative.

My three children put on a brave face but were very frightened. My elder son took four days off work and came in morning and evening. My daughter left her toddler, and came to sit with me and read me ghost stories.

At one point I awoke to find a doctor beside me saying they were doing everything they could to diagnose me, and were going to put me in intensive care if things didn’t improve.

There was a terrifying moment when I put my head back and choked as my swollen throat closed and I couldn’t breathe. I coughed myself back to life.

Then, finally, five days after I’d been admitted, I was just beginning to feel a tiny positive change for the better, when the diagnosis came through.

Measles.

At a recent hospital follow-up, the doctor told me it can take that long to diagnose measles as the samples have to be sent to a reference laboratory. So rare has measles become that few people have seen it or can now identify it.

After that first question when I was admitted, measles hadn’t been mentioned. Unlike Weil’s disease (they asked me repeatedly if I’d swum in a stagnant pond — it’s caught from rat’s urine) or hives, or some frightening autoimmune disease.

Until Andrew Wakefield’s utterly discredited report in 1998, connecting the MMR vaccine with autism, even though I was unvaccinated, herd immunity was high and I was relatively safe.

My children and my two grandchildren, thank goodness, had had their MMR — I’ve always been very pro-vaccination but it never occurred to me to get it myself.

But thanks to Wakefield, the damage to herd immunity and the public’s lack of trust in vaccination accelerated. As we know, it rolled over into Covid, with more than 1.5 million adults in the UK refusing to have the vaccine.

The Daily Mail reported on the dangerously low uptake of the MMR vaccine in May 2023: in Hackney, for example, only 60 per cent of five-year-olds had both doses.

Measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases. By July, Public Health England had announced an outbreak in London, where I caught it.

If I’d been aware of the outbreak, I would have asked for the MMR jab. Following my experience, at least one friend has already now had the jab.

Because without the MMR, you risk infecting a pregnant woman with rubella and endangering her baby. Boys can be rendered infertile if they catch mumps at the wrong time. And measles can lead to serious complications, especially for children. Since the introduction of the vaccine, 4,500 deaths have been averted in the UK.

I’m going to be OK, I hope, although there may be long-lasting effects.

Three weeks after I was discharged, the doctor warned me about post-viral fatigue. It’ll be a while before I go to a party, work all day, or run 5k regularly as I used to.

Whatever your age, check your records and your memory. If you have the slightest doubt about whether you have had the vaccine or not, I’d book an MMR.

Spread the word, and get us back up to the 95 per cent vaccine coverage target for herd immunity across the UK. You’ll be helping to prevent people of all ages getting seriously ill — and could be saving children’s lives.