Parents were repeatedly told that if they didn’t have their kids vaccinated that their babies would get sick and die. To scare everyone witless, a television advertisement featured a tiny baby coughing its lungs out. No-one knew that the baby was premature, too young to be vaccinated and that the majority of whooping cough occurred in appropriately vaccinated babies and children, a trend which continues to this day. The message was, and is, that where vaccination is delayed, there is a four fold increase in illness, implying that had babies been vaccinated on time, they wouldn’t have had whooping cough, or at least it would have been milder. However the disease burden statistics reflect a different view.