The health minister on Monday reiterated his call for parents to ensure their children have been vaccinated against measles as the disease has reached record high numbers across Europe with more than 41,000 people having been infected in the first six months of the year, culminating in 37 deaths.

As a result of the outbreak and heightened awareness, Mater Dei Hospital will be offering the MMR vaccination to all its employees.

Any parent’s failure to vaccinate their children against measles – through dereliction of duty or lack of brain cells – should be considered by the authorities as an offence tantamount to child abuse.

And for that matter, any parent preferring to get their advice on their own children’s health from the internet and social media should be similarly accused.

The fact that there are still parents out there who are flatly refusing to vaccinate their children is nothing short of tragic.  In Malta, we have seen just five cases so far this year, but that does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that we are in the clear.

In fact, the measles vaccine coverage rate at the moment is of 94 per cent, which is encouraging but which still means that six per cent of Maltese children are not covered.  And that is not only dangerous for their own sake.  Children who are not vaccinated, in fact, also pose a danger to other children on the playground or at school who are too small for vaccines or who cannot be vaccinated because they suffer from immunosuppressive diseases.

This is an unnecessary and unacceptable tragedy when we have a safe and effective vaccine available to prevent the disease.

But that is just the problem. In many cases, the failure on the part of parents to have their children vaccinated could be because they care an awful lot, but they have dangerously based their children’s wellbeing on dire misinformation - the infamous 1998 Wakefield study, which stated that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The results of the study turned out to be untrue and Andrew Wakefield, one of the authors of the study, even had his medical license revoked as a result.

In 2010, The Lancet issued a full retraction of the paper, explaining it had accepted that claims made by the researchers were ‘false’.

Moreover, contracting the three diseases for which the vaccine serves to prevent may have serious consequences that could lead to permanent disabilities and even death and any decision against giving the vaccine is most definitely not in children’s best interests.

Yet, like the flatearthers out there, there are still those vaccine sceptics who insist on believing in this fallacious study.

The MMR vaccine is one of the most important inoculations for children. It is administered when the child is about 13 months and a booster dose is administered at around three to four years of age. It is as simple as that, once a child has had two vaccinations they are considered to be immune.

And the only way the government could make it easier for parents would be for it to send doctors to people’s home to give children the injection. At childbirth parents are given that green booklet, a ‘guide to your child’s health’ of sorts, which gives new parents step-by-step instructions on when the newborn will have to have his or her inoculations and what injections they will need to have.

Plus, those injections are free of charge at the National Immunisation Centre in Floriana.

Do not be fooled and do not rely on social media for information. Talk to your doctor if you really have any hang-ups about vaccinating your child. This is children’s very health that is at stake, and not some post-truth pick and choose the truth game.