.

Measles can kill you. More cases have been reported in England in 2024 than in any year since the mid-1990s. Who will pay for this? Your children.

NHS England figures released yesterday reveal terrifying attitudes to childhood vaccinations.

Vaccination rates have dropped across every one of the 14 measures looked at, and not a single vaccine reaches its target of 95 per cent coverage. Uptake of the MMR vaccine - the three-in-one jab for measles, mumps and rubella - is way below 95 per cent for all age groups and at the lowest levels since 2010.

I have been reading through the reasons parents might not vaccinate their children, but despite my wide-open mind, I cannot find any reasonable defence of not giving your child something that would save them from a host of life-threatening and life-changing diseases. So is it time to start penalising parents who will not have their children vaccinated? We are fined for much less, such as taking children out of school in term time.

Growing up, I learned early on that vaccinations were a good thing. My mum, a community paediatrician who worked in schools and clinics, was one of the first cohort to administer the MMR in the late 1980s.

Looking back, I can see that I was administered a considerable dose of what I will call “vaccine privilege”; through my mother I had access to an informed medical opinion.

Other people grew up with confusing headlines about the dangers of MMR, and its now fully debunked links to autism.

Sadly, journalism shoulders much of the blame for how people lost trust in the MMR vaccine. In 1998, the medical journal The Lancet published the findings of the now disgraced Dr Andrew Wakefield, who wrongly linked the groundbreaking vaccine to autism. News outlets took this “junk science” and ran with it.

After years of vigorous denial, The Lancet retracted the hugely damaging report in 2010, by which time all players had entirely lost control of the story, influencing vaccine uptake for the next quarter of a century.

And yet ultimately, it is down to parents to get their children vaccinated. Should there be some kind of deterrent for parents who choose not to? I can’t foresee a time when fines for anti-vaxxers are introduced or enforced. But I would absolutely support it.

For those wringing their hands about a “nanny state”, maybe this is the kind of positive outcome we could see from an actual nanny state: that we safeguard the human rights of all children to live free from the bonkers beliefs of their parents.

There are obviously some serious access issues to vaccination and to parents keeping up with the vaccination schedule. Maybe they don’t have a permanent home, or access to a GP. Maybe because of work, money or a coercive partner, they struggle to visit the doctor. The individual is often not at fault.

And there are genuine cultural barriers for communities who have lost - or never had - any trust in medicine, doctors and public health institutions in general, because they have long been poorly treated by them, or worse.

I understand that more and more insistent messaging from the medical figureheads they distrust might not get their attention either.

And yet, I struggle to understand what else other than the cold truth can convince someone to protect their child. What is more, I cannot see that these populations account for the shortfall.

According to results released at the same time as the vaccination data, the Department of Health and Social Care found that having a sick child is one of the most stressful aspects of family life.

There is one surefire way to reduce the likelihood of your own child - and everyone else’s - getting ill. Go get them vaccinated.