Originally from: Roger Walker
                        
Christopher Booker's Notebook
(Filed: 30/12/2001)
Campaigns for justice can still be won
AT the end of the year I reflect sadly on how many battles that I have reported in this column seem to wind on without resolution. One of the weirdest battles of 2001, for instance, was that over the vaccination of animals against foot and mouth disease.
On one hand a phalanx of the world's leading veterinary experts, led by Professor Fred Brown, Dr Simon Barteling and Dr Paul Sutmoller, tirelessly made the case for a vaccination policy that could have saved Britain from much of its worst ever farming disaster.
Yet on Friday's BBC Today programme, the Government's chief scientist, Professor David King – whose expertise is "surface chemistry" – was yet again allowed by the presenter James Naughtie to trot out all those tired objections to vaccination that are dismissed by the real experts as being based on no more than scientific ignorance.
Change, however, may be on the way. Earlier this month, at a two-day international conference in Brussels, it was clear that the British team, led by Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, was now almost totally isolated in its hostility to vaccination.
It was the British who, in 1990, persuaded Brussels to drop the policy of routine vaccination which in 30 years had made the European Community disease free.
As David Byrne, the Commissioner in charge of foot and mouth policy, made clear, however, there is no way that the EU could accept any repetition of the catastrophic mass-slaughter of healthy animals which marked the 2001 epidemic in Britain.
Mrs Beckett and Professor King may soon find they are forced to accept vaccination regardless. It will be fascinating to see just how quickly their objections melt away once the policy line from the top has changed.

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