If you ever find yourself arguing with an anti-vaxer, point them at this page. One personal story beats a thousand medical statistics.
When someone has a closed reasoning system, even an emotional story will not sway them. It will be waved away as a rare outlier, or something God wanted to happen to that person, or fake news ginned up by Big Pharma, &c.
People like anti-vaxxxers don't just have strong beliefes, strongly held, they have integrated their beliefs into their personal identity, they have integrated their beliefs into their tribal membership, and they have converted them into a persecution complex.
Those three things--personal identity, tribal membership, and persecution complex--brush truth aside like chaff in the breeze.
This is why the internet changes everything about radicalization: It makes it nearly frictionless to find a critical mass of other people who share your ideology and engage with them all day long.
I understand that the BBC might want to play the "statistically irrelevant but emotionally moving" card from time to time, as it's provably more efficient and, at their scale, could even save a sizeable number of lives.
But I still had hope that the comparatively much smaller population reading HN was into science as opposed to this kind of "argument".
Is it really important to have a real life illustration of the possible consequences of the feer of vaccines? I doubt it. Can you convince anyone to question his own irrational thoughts by resorting to irrational arguments, or do you actually help the bad habit to grow longer roots?
As the saying goes, the most pernicious way to damage a cause is to argue for it with dubious means.
Granted it's not exactly the same thing, but Oxfam uses campaigns which hilight the story of a single child suffering extreme poverty rather than attempting to move people with statistics which express the scale of the problem.
If the hypothetical anti-vaxxer didn't already know that life-threatening diseases exist and can be prevented with vaccines, that's probably where you should have started your argument.