Twenty-week-old Grayson was at risk of becoming one of the tens of thousands of babies in Britain who are not vaccinated against polio.
His mother, Lily, supports immunisation in principle. But after a traumatic birth, she was experiencing post-partum depression and felt overwhelmed by the demands of caring for a newborn. The idea of making a lengthy trip to a doctor’s surgery became an additional obstacle.
“I’ve been through the trenches, awake all night. You don’t want to leave the house, or go to a different town.”
Grayson was meant to receive his polio and diphtheria vaccinations when he was eight weeks old. As the weeks passed without the appointment taking place, he was formally recorded by the NHS as “overdue” – effectively placing him on his GP’s list of children who had missed their scheduled jabs.
The situation changed when Lily discovered that a vaccination clinic was operating close to home, in a place she had not expected to find one.
The service is based in Keighley, west Yorkshire, inside a vacant retail unit at the Airedale shopping centre. The shopping precinct, which dates from the 1960s, has struggled in recent years, according to local people, with numerous units empty and boarded up.
Those behind the clinic decided that one of the unused shops could instead be put to practical use as a venue for childhood vaccinations.
“This was an empty shop; there was nothing here, the windows were all blacked out,” Flora Jennings, a local charity coordinator, says while visiting the clinic, as the sound of a baby laughing can be heard nearby.
The clinic represents a creative response to a problem affecting the whole country. Childhood vaccination rates have declined across Britain over the past 15 years.
In England, 81% of five-year-olds have received the four-in-one vaccine, which protects against illnesses including polio and tetanus. That figure stood at 89% in 2014.
Around 84% of children have had both recommended doses of the MMR vaccine, protecting against measles, mumps and rubella. A decade ago, the proportion was 88%.
Prof Dan Hungerford, an epidemiologist at the University of Liverpool who gave evidence to Parliament on the issue, says the scale of the decline becomes clearer when Britain is compared with other countries.
“If you just look at the generalised population, the decline doesn’t look horrific,” he says. “But if you compare us to other nations, particularly our European neighbours, we are one of the worst-performing countries in terms of getting early-life vaccinations to children.”
The figures have prompted politicians to question how Britain, the birthplace of Edward Jenner – widely regarded as the “father of immunology” – allowed childhood immunisation coverage to fall so far.
They are also considering what measures could reverse the trend. One Labour MP on the Health Committee has told the BBC that Britain should examine mandatory childhood vaccinations, a policy already used in some countries but still regarded as controversial in Britain.
For families such as Lily’s, however, the experience in Keighley suggests that access and convenience may be part of the answer. A vaccination service in a nearby empty shop meant Grayson could receive the protection he had missed, without his mother having to undertake the difficult journey she had initially feared.
