Two young people are dead and 20 are receiving treatment after a meningitis outbreak at the University of Kent. The students caught up in it belong to a generation that has never been routinely vaccinated against the strain responsible.
That is not because a vaccine doesn’t exist. It does. Bexsero, which protects against meningococcal group B disease (the strain responsible for the Kent outbreak), has been available since 2013. The UK even became the first country in the world to add it to its national immunisation schedule in September 2015.
But only for babies.
Every student at university today was born before July 2015, meaning every one of them missed the cut-off. The NHS never offered them the jab, and no catch-up programme was ever provided. A decade of students has passed through higher education with no…