By stewartb

To follow up on the vaccination topic, the BBC News article also has this:

‘… all of the public health experts who spoke to the BBC said that whilst anti-vax social media sentiment plays its part, they don’t think it’s the main reason immunisation rates have slipped. Instead, they point to something more mundane: they think that parents of young children simply have fewer face-to-face contacts with medical professionals than they did 10 or 15 years ago.’ (my emphasis)

From one researcher: ‘vaccination rates are highest when parents regularly interact with medics, who can remind them to get their children jabbed and tell them exactly where to do it. And those interactions have become rarer.

‘England has seen a 45% decline over the last decade in the number of health visitors (nurses and midwives who treat young children at their home), according to BBC analysis. It’s part of a health visitor’s job to remind parents about vaccines and, in some cases, administer jabs directly.’

See this from TuS (April 20, 2026): Health visitors in England are key to Labour’s preventative strategy but they’re plummeting there after two years in government while Scotland after 19 years of the SNP has four times as many per head, twice the essential continuity and twice the visits

Health visitors in England are key to Labour’s preventative strategy but they’re plummeting there after two years in government while Scotland after 19 years of the SNP has four times as many per head, twice the essential continuity and twice the visits

More generally, this BBC News website article on the subject of vaccination is a ‘classic’ of BBC reporting – seamless shifts between references to ‘Britain’/’British’ and ‘England’/’English’ in a report purportedly on a UK ‘issues’ but based only on data from England!