How should we tackle vaccine hesitancy?

As Britain celebrates its vaccination success, we’re in danger of missing something important. A great many people have been offered the vaccine, but have turned it down — and we hear very little about them. No. 10 briefings trumpet the numbers vaccinated in the past 24 hours but are silent on the numbers who have refused. This matters, because if vaccine passports are on their way, granting access to pubs and so on, the unvaccinated will be excluded. More importantly, the unvaccinated will be vulnerable to the virus as we unlock. We need to know more about them.

Dig deep enough and rough figures are there. Let’s look at the over-seventies in England. According to data from Oxford University’s OpenSAFELY analytics platform, just 4 per cent of white people in this group are unvaccinated: a hugely impressive number, beating expectations. But among those described as ‘black African’ the proportion is almost ten times as great, at 37 per cent.