Will chickenpox jab revive flagging faith in vaccinations?

Young children in England are to be offered a chickenpox vaccine on the NHS. It will be combined into the routine MMR jabs, at 12 months and 18 months. But it's not clear how well it will be taken up, after new data points to a continuing lack of faith in childhood vaccines, and the MMR jab in particular.

In England last year, none of the main childhood vaccines reached their 95% uptake target, according to the UK Health Security Agency, and only 83.7% of children aged five had had both MMR doses – the lowest level since 2009.

What did the commentators say?

There's been a rise in "vaccine distrust", said Jim Read, the BBC's health reporter. "Something has happened" since the Covid pandemic and "confidence in all types of vaccination has taken a significant hit". Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggests that, in 2023, "70% of UK adults" felt that "vaccinations were safe and effective" – and that's "down sharply from 90% in 2018".

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The "current wave" of "vaccine hesitancy" is the "latest rekindling of an angry debate" that's reared its head at intervals stretching back to 1796 and the creation of the smallpox vaccine. But, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian, it owes much to the "infamous" and "absolute garbage" late 1990s scare about the safety of the MMR vaccine.

Distrust "didn’t delay the Covid vaccine rollout" but it did "sully the triumph, with the loud disquiet of a minority who "thought they were being deliberately poisoned by the state". The anti-vax movement is "probably the most depressing conspiracy theory there is" because vaccination is "the most concrete proof of how much we rely on one another's care and rationality".

Even without the conspiracy theories, vaccination programmes can falter when they become "victims of their own success", said The Economist. The HPV vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds against the virus that can cause cervical cancer has been extraordinarily effective but, as cervical cancer becomes "less common", parents feel "less worried about it" and take-up among UK children has "plummeted" .

There are also economic challenges: jab reminders are often given by health visitors and their "workforce numbers have declined rapidly since 2015", said Liz Crosbie in East Anglia Bylines, "with a third lost". "Austerity has impacted how public health is being delivered".

So, to increase vaccine uptake, there must be a "significant effort from public health authorities", including "open conversations" that "gently include those who are currently excluded" and "those who choose to exclude themselves" – or the "threat to the nation's children" will increase.

But this isn't always easy. When I confronted a work colleague who refused to let her children have the MMR vaccine, I "couldn't contain my anger", wrote Stephen Pollard in The Spectator. I told her she was "endangering the lives of other kids" and she seemed "stunned anyone would say such a thing" because, "in her bubble of idiots, her views were, presumably, the norm".

What next?

The chickenpox vaccine will be given to England's eligible toddlers from January, and a "catch up" campaign is also in the works for older children. Healthcare policy is devolved in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

"It's our job as the government", and as everyone "on the side of common sense and reason", to "win this battle against the conspiracy theorists, and misinformers and disinformers", who must be "dealt with and need to be silenced", said health minister Stephen Kinnock.