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Harold Lambert - Vaccination controversies (36/76)

73 views · Published 11 August 2017 · 7:25 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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British doctor Harold Lambert (1926-2017) spent his career tackling infectious diseases, helping in the development of pyrazinamide as an effective treatment for tuberculosis. He also published work on the rational use of antibiotics and was a trustee and medical advisor for the Meningitis Research Foundation. [Listener: Roger Higgs; date recorded: 2004]

TRANSCRIPT: You're proposing to do something to a normal, your normal child, so maybe he'll get measles, maybe he won't, you know. It's actually, a lot of the public controversies of... about this don't recognise that. I'm not saying you should yield to that naturally and don't immunise people, but I'm saying it's very difficult because I'm obviously strongly in favour of immunisation.

[RH] What about measles? Is, is...

Well, measles, the main complication was pneumonia and the other big complication, which people trivialise, is otitis media, which as you know often leads to deafness, and is itself a painful and miserable thing. And then about one in 1000 got encephalitis which was sometimes... so, I mean, one in 1000 doesn't sound much, but if everyone gets measles it's a lot of people. So, you know, when the disease was common, that's a substantial thing to contend with, which I've seen a number of times.

[RH] And... and the modern, controversies with the MMR vaccine and such like, has that, did that make you gnash your teeth or...

Well, it does a bit because a lot of it is really nonsensical really at an intellectual level, but it's not nonsensical emotionally. And it's extraordinarily difficult. One of the bits of research we did on pertussis, a chap called Ian Johnston who's now a chest physician in Nottingham, was really a very, very detailed epidemiological study of, I think it was about 170 children or something with about... with two controls for each child, and in order to not to confound for the social background it was done in schools so, roughly speaking, people in the same school in Merton, would be more or less the same social class and the same family structures. And he did enormously detailed lung function studies on children known to have had pertussis at various times before with their controls. And the answer really was in British children in that time, which would have been, I suppose, the '70 or '80, '80, there wasn't evidence of lung damage following pertussis. Now, there are two snags about that. First of all, poor countries as opposed to here, and the other thing is a rare consequence and, as I said before, we used to do chest surgery on children who'd had... who had bronchiectasis and said to have had it following pertussis, and if you said would that exclude... it was a good study, I'd stand by every word of it, I think it was just actually a very good study. I mean, it was in combination with Ross Anderson, you know, the professor of epidemiology and, and, and Alan was a very careful chap. It was really good. But if you said,  'Oh, does that exclude the possibility of a patient getting bronchiectasis, maybe one in 1000 cases?' Well, no, it doesn't because you can't do that sort of... the work is too big. So, I think, I think most of the... I was on the joint committee of vaccination for many years, the main pontificating body about this, and I think it was a jolly good committee which did very good work and I think the public health relationships of the people concerned, not on the committee, but in the Department of Health and the Public Health Service, with what was about as honest and straightforward as you could make them within the limits of mutual understanding. I really would defend them, what they did, not because I was personally involved with that aspect, but I think it was valid. But at the end of the day there's this thing we were saying. At the end of the day you've got: a) doing something to your normal child, which he might not get or might not get badly and the other thing is, you know, rare, what about rare things. Do you think one in 1000 children might get this. Actually, as you know, it's extraordinarily difficult to say that. You can't really. So, you can't really totally, honestly answer people about that. [...]

Read the full transcript on [https://www.webofstories.com/play/harold.lambert/36].

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