Twenty-week-old Grayson easily could have become one of the tens of thousands of British babies left unvaccinated against polio. His mother, Lily, agrees with the principle of immunisation. But overwhelmed by the early weeks of motherhood, and suffering from post-partum depression after a traumatic birth, she was daunted by the prospect of a long journey to a doctor's surgery.
"I've been through the trenches, awake all night. You don't want to leave the house, or go to a different town."
Not even to protest your newborn against fatal disease? I know better than to wonder why the father couldn’t have taken the kid!
Weeks ticked by, and eventually Grayson missed the polio and diphtheria jabs he was supposed to get at eight weeks old. By that point he was officially classed by the NHS as "overdue" for vaccination; effectively, he was on his GP's naughty list.
Then Lily realised there was a clinic practically on her doorstep - at a location she hadn't expected.That clinic - in Keighley, west Yorkshire - runs from a vacant retail unit at the Airedale shopping centre, a 1960s-era precinct that locals say has fallen on hard times in recent years, with plenty of empty, boarded-up units. The staff who created the clinic thought: why not use one of those vacant units to administer vaccines?
Well, marginally better than a self-immolating vape shop or Turkish barber VAT fraud outlet, I guess....
It's an imaginative solution to a national problem. Over the last 15 years, childhood vaccination rates have fallen across Britain. The share of five-year-olds in England who have received a four-in-one jab (which protects against viruses like polio and tetanus) is now 81%, down from 89% in 2014. About 84% have received both of their recommended MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) jabs, down from 88% a decade ago.
And no, the culprit isn't what you'd expect, either:
Beccy Baird, a senior fellow at the King's Fund think tank, says that despite colourful media reporting around "anti-vaxxers", most parents who turn down vaccination are not ideologically opposed to it. Convenience plays a big role, she says; 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.
Then make sure the GP service is there for them to do it, and not ring-fenced by barbed wire and dragon-like receptionists that make it impossible to get an appointment!
There's Lily, the 18-year-old who finally gets her son Grayson his polio and diphtheria jabs. And there's Keeley, an assistant in a ceramics shop, who arrives with her baby Luca, and is impressed by the clinic's convenience, with no need for an 08:00 phone call or complicated online form.
See? Why aren't the GPs run like this?
Most of the young mothers have come across online anti-vax posts. "I see these things on Facebook where it's like, don't give your child vaccines because it's got ADHD in them," says Lily. Indeed, Hussain says she still hears parents asking if the MMR jab causes autism, a full 28 years after a link was suggested in a now-discredited paper by the former doctor Andrew Wakefield.
And you'll no doubt hear it until a more convincing arguement for the cause of the rise in the disorder is discoverered.
The clinic - which serves a relatively poor community - has vaccinated hundreds of infants since 2023, helping to boost coverage in an area that's historically had a low rate of immunisations. As of March this year, 88% of the children registered with Modality AWC (the GP practice that runs the clinic) now receive their first MMR dose by the age of 18 months, up from 78% three years ago.
Is it a 'poor' area in monetary terms, or educational ones?
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