Whooping cough: Why have vaccination rates plummeted in pregnant women?

So far in 2024 England has had 10 000 laboratory confirmed cases of whooping cough (pertussis), and 10 infants have died from the infection.1 While a rise in cases was not unexpected given that the last peak was in 2016, health officials are concerned about high numbers in vulnerable babies, with 328 cases occurring in those under the age of 3 months.

Ongoing analysis of data from England shows that whooping cough vaccine, when given at the right time in pregnancy, provides 92% protection against infant death. Yet its uptake in England, from a high of 72.6% in March 2017, has now declined to 58.9%. Public health experts warn that vaccine hesitancy, while it may play a part, is unlikely to explain the scale of the drop—which raises questions as to whether the NHS is doing enough to meet the needs of pregnant women.

Judith Nicholson from Oxfordshire had a baby last December. Given her background—scientific editor for the journal Cell Genomics—she says that there was never any doubt that she’d have the vaccine, but she found it hard to navigate the system. “I remember at one appointment being told, ‘You'll need a whooping cough jab and a glucose tolerance test.’ I wandered around …