Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Mrs Barker. I commend the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) on setting out the work that the Health and Social Care Committee has done, and all its members on looking into this vital issue.
Not so long ago, hospitals in this country were filled with rows of iron lungs ventilating children paralysed by polio, and schools were forced to close their doors as measles swept through entire classrooms, leaving some children permanently disabled, and some parents burying their children. We do not see those scenes today, and that is because of one the single greatest achievements in the history of medicine: vaccination. In 2026, it is easy to forget that and to take for granted a world in which parents do not fear that a common childhood illness might kill their child.
However, we are at risk of forgetting the lessons our grandparents learned the hard way, and the numbers prove it. In England, just 81% of five-year-olds have received their 4-in-1 jab against diseases such as polio and tetanus, down from 89% a decade ago, and only 84% have had both their MMR jabs, down from 88%. No childhood vaccine in this country now meets the 95% coverage threshold the World Health Organisation tells us we need in order to keep these diseases from spreading—and they are spreading. Over 800 cases of measles have already been confirmed this year, closing in on the total for the whole of last year.
Vaccine take-up is not evenly spread across our country either. In London, MMR coverage is just 72%, but in the south-west it is 83%—an 11 point gap mapped on to deprivation, inequalities and communities that already find it hardest to access the healthcare they need. It is not just children: only 70% of over-65s and 42% of pregnant women received a flu vaccine this past season, both figures well short of where they need to be. Last year gave us one of the worst flu seasons in memory.
As the hon. Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) noted, the tragedy we saw with the Kent meningitis outbreak earlier this year led to a change in policy on vaccination for meningitis, and we saw that there was the capacity for authorities to do more and to take action. As a mum to a teen who has been called for a meningitis vaccination this summer, I am hugely grateful for that change in policy. That action tells us something important: that when we make vaccination easier to access, uptake follows, and that this is not a lost cause but a policy failure, and policy failures can be fixed.
There is also a darker force at work, and we must be honest about it. Online medical disinformation is a genuine threat to public health, and it is increasingly being given a platform by people who should know better. Reform has refused to condemn Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories linking vaccines to autism. As was noted by the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley), at Reform UK’s conference last year a keynote speaker blamed vaccines for cancer in the royal family.
We have seen in the United States exactly where this leads: trusted scientific institutions hollowed out, and the health of a nation put at risk. Doctors and nurses in our own GP surgeries and walk-in centres are now telling us that they are hearing these same conspiracy theories in this country today. We must listen to scientists, not conspiracy theorists, and politicians who lend credibility to dangerous medical falsehoods must be held to account for the harm they cause.
What can we do about it? First, we can invest properly, and for the long term, in our vaccination programmes. This cannot keep being treated as a cost-neutral afterthought. NHS England’s strategy exists on paper, but everyone—from clinicians to campaigners—agrees that it lacks the funding and senior leadership to actually turn things around.
Secondly, we can take vaccination to where people already are. Community spaces and the places people trust should be central to how we deliver an ambitious new push for record vaccination rates. That is particularly true among the communities that we too often write off as hard to reach.
Thirdly, we need a serious, funded strategy to fight medical disinformation head on—not one or two well-meaning social media videos, but a real strategy. That means supporting doctors and nurses with the tools and training to engage constructively with vaccine-sceptical patients; investing in public health messaging that works with trusted local voices and online influencers, not against them; targeted outreach to the communities where scepticism runs deepest; criminal liability for online influencers and politicians alike who profit from spreading dangerous medical disinformation; and a new verification system so that no one can falsely claim to be a medical professional online.
None of that is about shaming families who have been misled. It is about meeting them where they are, with facts, compassion and a system that makes doing the right thing the easy thing. We owe it to every family who lived through the era of iron lungs and empty classrooms not to let their hard-won progress slip away on our watch. Let us fund vaccination properly, let us take it into every community and let us have the courage to say clearly and without apology that we follow the science, not the conspiracy theories.