This year, a cluster of measles cases in north London has forced parents to queue outside GP surgeries for emergency MMR jabs — something that would have seemed implausible to politicians and doctors who were able to declare the disease eliminated in the UK in 2017. A month earlier, an outbreak of the Nipah virus in India, which kills up to 75 per cent of those it infects, prompted the quarantine of hundreds and a scramble to trace contacts before the pathogen could board a plane.
Neither is a pandemic. But together, and against an alarming backdrop of declining vaccination rates, a hollowed-out World Health Organization (WHO), and a White House that has elevated vaccine scepticism from fringe position to federal policy, they point to a worrying development.
