today's health story

Outbreak fears over falling childhood vaccine uptake

What happened
Childhood vaccination rates in England have dropped to their lowest levels in more than a decade, sparking warnings from health officials about an upsurge in diseases. New figures from the UK Health Security Agency show that none of the key vaccines met the 95% coverage needed to prevent the spread of illnesses such as measles, meningitis and polio. Just 83.7% of five-year-olds received both doses of the MMR jab in 2024-25, the lowest uptake since 2009-10. So far this year 674 measles cases have been recorded, with children under 10 the most affected.

Who said what
Professor Paul Hunter of the University of East Anglia blamed "a lot of misinformation around vaccines, particularly the MMR vaccine", for seeding doubts among parents. The current low uptake rates have "prompted fears that children will be more vulnerable to infectious diseases as they begin primary school in September", said Tobi Thomas in The Guardian.

What next?
Dr Ben Kasstan-Dabush of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has advised families to rely on the NHS website or their GP "as information on social media may not be based on scientific evidence".

Today's pharmaceutical story

Drug firm halts UK supply of weight loss drug

What happened
The manufacturer of the weight loss drug Mounjaro has paused shipments to the UK ahead of an upcoming price hike. US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly said the move was made in order to manage supply and ensure that patients maintained access to the drug before next month's cost increase.

The price of Mounjaro is to rise by 170%, with the highest dose increasing from £122 to £330. It comes "amid White House pressure to increase the price of the drug abroad so that it can be made cheaper in the US", said Sky News.

Who said what
Dr Leyla Hannbeck, chief executive of the Independent Pharmacies Association, said it was "completely unacceptable" that Eli Lilly was raising prices "with minimal notice" and that suspending supplies in the meantime was "making matters worse". Eli Lilly said the price hike was due to the company "now aligning the list price more consistently to ensure fair global contributions to the cost of innovation".

What next?
Pharmacists have warned that more people "could turn to the black market" as a result, said The Times. Border Force seized some 18,300 illegal weight loss and diabetes medications at Heathrow Airport in the 12 months to June.

It's not all bad

A grassroots scheme in Somerset is breathing life back into the county's dwindling eel population while reviving its cultural heritage. The Somerset Eel Recovery Project blends science, education and local folklore, employing strategies ranging from having classroom eel tanks to holding workshops where residents craft straw ropes that young eels use to climb over river barriers. Backed by campaigner Feargal Sharkey and chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the effort aims to reconnect communities with their waterways.

under the radar

What all-bot social networks can tell us about ourselves

Why have social media platforms become so polarised? And can they ever be fixed? These two questions are at the heart of a novel experiment at the University of Amsterdam.

The researchers simulated a social media platform, populated it entirely with AI chatbots and then kept tweaking it to see what happened. Sadly, their findings offered little to suggest that the networks on which we spend so much time scrolling will become more pleasant anytime soon.

To see if they could prevent their simulated platform from "turning into a polarised hellscape", the experts tried "six specific intervention strategies", said science site Futurism. These included "switching to chronological news feeds, boosting diverse viewpoints, hiding social statistics like follower counts and removing account bios".

But, disappointingly, only some of the six strategies "showed modest effects" and others actually "made the situation even worse", said Ars Technica. When they ordered the news feed chronologically, "attention inequality" was reduced, but it led to the "amplification of extreme content". And boosting the diversity of viewpoints to "broaden users' exposure to opposing political views" had no significant impact at all.

The findings "don’t exactly speak well" of humans, said Gizmodo, considering the chatbots were meant to clone how we interact. So it seems that social media may just be illogical for us to "navigate without reinforcing our worst instincts and behaviours".

It's "a fun house mirror for humanity" that "reflects us, but in the most distorted of ways". And it might just be that there are no lenses "strong enough" to "correct how we see each other online".

on this day

29 August 1949

The Soviet Union secretly performed its first successful nuclear weapons test at the Semipalatinsk site in northeast Kazakhstan. In May this year the families of those affected by the radiation from those blasts called for Russia to pay compensation for the mutations passed down through the generations.

Today's newspapers

'Itch all over'

"They think itch all over", says Metro, reporting on the news that a chickenpox vaccine is going to be given to children as part of routine GP appointments from next year. It will be combined with the ones for measles, mumps and rubella, making it into a new MMRV jab, says The Times. The Russian envoys to the UK and EU have been summoned after overnight air strikes on Ukraine's capital, says The Guardian. Meanwhile, Prince Harry may meet the King for the first time in nearly two years when he visits London next month, says The Mirror. Hopes are growing for a "healing" of the "family rift", says the tabloid.

See the newspaper front pages

tall tale

Paws and effect

A pet owner in France has been fined €110 (£95) for the alleged repeated miaowing of Monet, her white cat, on a high-speed train between Vannes in Brittany and the capital. Camille, the cat’s owner, said Monet "miaowed a bit at the start" of the journey. Rail operator SCNF claimed that a conductor had asked Camille to sit with Monet in a largely empty coach, but that she had turned down the offer. It added that the cat’s noise had provoked "acute tensions" with other passengers.

Morning Report was written and edited by Arion McNicoll, Jamie Timson, Sorcha Bradley, Ross Couzens and Chas Newkey-Burden, with illustrations by Julia Wytrazek.