Press Council Ruling: A Man and the Irish Examiner

On 19 July the Press Ombudsman upheld a complaint that a headline in the Irish Examiner breached Principle 1 (Truth and Accuracy) of the Code of Practice of the Press Council of Ireland.

On 5 June 2019 the Irish Examiner published in print and online an article under the headline “Anti-vaccine campaign led to boy ending up in A&E”. The account was based on a report in Epi-Insight, an online publication of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (a HSE agency for the surveillance of communicable diseases). The report said the case “highlights the potential for a vaccine-preventable disease to cause acute, life-threatening illness in an unvaccinated child”. The article stated that “even though both parents were “well informed” regarding vaccine-preventable diseases … they chose not to have him vaccinated ... (because of) social media reports of a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism spectrum disorder”. The article reported that the child had non-typable haemophilus influenza