Remember me
“There were rumours,” Rosie Duffield reflects. The Canterbury MP, whose constituency includes the University of Kent, has many friends working in higher education locally, and children who are of school and student age. On Sunday 15 March, her phone didn’t stop. “I just thought, maybe someone’s got meningitis – but I didn’t know.” Messages passed between young people can often become exaggerated or misunderstood.
But confirmation came that evening from a BBC journalist: two young people in Canterbury – one a student at the University of Kent – had died from the disease. “My immediate thought was: which families? And, oh my God, how awful.” The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, was in touch later that night and connected Duffield to health officials. She has been in close contact ever since.
Within hours, what had begun as rumour became something else: a test not just of public health response and communication, but of how the public understands risk in a post-pandemic Britain. The cluster of meningitis cases in Kent shows the extent to which Covid-era fear still shapes the response to even relatively rare diseases.
Louise Jones-Roberts heard from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on Sunday afternoon. She owns two nightclubs in Canterbury: Club Chemistry and the Tokyo Tea Rooms. They contacted her with a direct message to the club’s Instagram account. There had been a confirmed case of meningitis in someone who had been in Club Chemistry, the message said, and she needed to contact the agency.
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“Because I’m a mum and I know about meningitis, I said, ‘Right, we need to tell as many people as possible what the symptoms are and what they need to do.’”
As staff drafted a post, worse news arrived: a 21-year-old University of Kent student and an 18-year-old school pupil, Juliette Kenny, had died. “That was just horrific,” Jones-Roberts says. We now know that several confirmed cases had been at the club the week before. Anyone who visited between 5 and 7 March was offered preventative antibiotics from 16 March, with vaccines made available later on. Around 2,000 people had attended Club Chemistry across those nights.
The UKHSA’s approach – contacting a nightclub via Instagram – initially seemed unusual to Jones-Roberts. “But actually, it was a really intelligent thing to do,” she says. “If they’d emailed, we might not have seen it until Monday.” All 91 staff received antibiotics within 24 hours. Two remain in hospital in a stable condition.
As word spread across Canterbury, the atmosphere changed. By Monday morning, the outbreak was national news.
“It immediately felt like we were back in the early days of Covid,” Duffield says. Some students stopped attending lectures even before formal guidance changed. Many began wearing masks. “Most of the young people I know are almost isolating by default. Lots of them do not want to go to school.” This is a scared generation, Duffield says: “So much of their life was impacted by Covid, and they’re immediately going back to that panic.”
Parents were anxious, too. “They’re asking me, ‘Should my child go to school?’ And I’m saying, ‘Technically, the advice is it’s completely all right. It’s not Covid. They’d have to have had very close contact.’”
That reassurance often isn’t enough – which Duffield understands. She tells parents that it’s up to them whether or not they keep their children home from school. “I’m not going to tell them to do something they feel is unsafe,” she says.
Duffield is right: meningitis is not Covid. While it is airborne, it is only transmitted through close, prolonged contact. It is far less contagious, and relatively rare. We are not going to see widespread national transmission and thousands of deaths across the country.
It is, however, extremely serious. It’s estimated that one in ten who contract meningitis B – the strain identified in Kent – will die. But unlike Covid, it is well understood. There are effective ways to treat it and to limit its spread if identified early.
What has felt familiar over the past week is not the disease itself, but the reaction to it: panic, speculation, and the rapid spread of scaremongering on social media. Alongside that, the need to attribute blame and find wrongdoing.
Jones-Roberts found herself unexpectedly at the centre of the storm. One journalist asked whether she felt responsible for the deaths. The question “blindsided” her. “Logically I know I’ve done nothing wrong,” she says, but she still feels guilty. “I feel horrific for the parents.”
There has also been criticism of the speed of the response. Yet those involved in public health say this misinterprets how outbreaks are identified.
“What the critics don’t understand is the time it takes to recognise you’ve got a cluster,” says Robert Dingwall, emeritus professor at Nottingham Trent University and a former government adviser during the Covid-19 outbreak. Patients present separately – to GPs, to A&E – and only gradually does a pattern emerge. Even then, a decision has to be made on when to announce it – especially if details haven’t been confirmed in the laboratory.
“We’re still seeing reverberations from the pandemic,” Dingwall says, pointing to both “unreasonable expectations of public health” and the misplaced belief that medicine can eliminate all risk.
Lucy Easthope, who advises governments on emergency planning and disaster response, puts it more bluntly: “Everybody is on edge.” Public fear is higher, and trust lower, than it was a decade ago. Both, she says, are entirely understandable and not without reason. But it makes the job of those dealing with major health events exceptionally difficult. Doctors in Kent have described being overwhelmed by people seeking reassurance. “Everyone with a headache or cold is coming to get checked,” one GP wrote, “which I understand entirely, it’s a terrifying disease. But now we are swamped. Utterly swamped.”
Both Easthope and Dingwall are critical of the use of the word “unprecedented” to describe the outbreak. Meningitis clusters, particularly in student populations, are not unusual, they say. “A meningitis outbreak is a classic scenario in a university [emergency] exercise,” Easthope says. “It’s something we plan for.” Before the pandemic, universities would make sure incoming students were alerted to the risks.
But the Kent outbreak is unusual in its speed, magnitude and high concentration. By Friday 20 March, 29 cases of meningitis B (MenB) had been recorded, all connected to Canterbury. That has surprised even experienced public health officials, who say they are doing all they can to try to find out why this outbreak appears to be different. While larger outbreaks of MenB have occurred before – including one in Gloucestershire in the 1980s – they have taken place over much longer periods. In that instance, 65 cases were recorded over four and a half years.
Even so, the challenge is not just medical. It is communicative: how to convey seriousness without frightening people. There was an observable shift in language as the week went on – more explanation, calmer tone, all with the aim of reassuring thousands of distressed young people and their parents.
“We would expect in the coming days for the case numbers to rise, certainly at least until the weekend,” Wes Streeting told the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday night. “We might also expect to see some cases in other parts of the country that are not linked to the Canterbury outbreak,” he added, because in any normal year there is roughly one case per day. “What I don’t want is for people to be unnecessarily worried.”
Nowhere is this challenge – of communicating relative risk – more evident than in the debate over the MenB vaccine.
Meningitis cases have fallen dramatically since the late 1990s due to successful vaccination programmes. In England, cases dropped from more than 2,500 in 1998-99 to 378 in 2024-25. MenB remains the most common strain.
The MenB vaccine (introduced in 2015) is only routinely given to babies, however, not to teenagers or young adults – despite their acknowledged high-risk profile. The decision was based on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), an independent and expert scientific committee that advises the government, which concluded that broader rollout was not cost-effective.
As Dingwall – a member of the JCVI during Covid – explained, the vaccine is less effective than those for other strains. Unlike many vaccines, it does not prevent transmission: it simply helps individuals from becoming seriously ill from the disease. Protection also appears to wane after a few years.
These decisions are based on cost-benefit analysis – a standard feature of healthcare policy, and one that up until the pandemic was “non-controversial”, Easthope argues. Resources are finite, and funding one intervention means diverting money from another. “The JCVI are very conscious of the fact that it is public money,” Dingwall says. “If they recommend a vaccine, it is very unlikely that their recommendation will be overridden by the Department of Health.”
In light of the Kent outbreak, the JCVI has been asked to review its guidance. That, too, is routine; recommendations evolve as new evidence emerges. This happened recently with chickenpox, for example: having previously not recommended a national vaccine programme in 2009, the JCVI changed its mind in 2023 as more information came to light.
For those directly affected, however, such calculations can feel abstract, irrelevant and even insulting.
Speaking from an abnormally quiet University of Kent campus, Jones-Roberts reflects on her own change in perspective. She has become one of a growing number of voices calling for a national MenB vaccine programme for teenagers and young adults. “Two weeks ago I’d have agreed with the cost-benefit argument,” she said. “I don’t feel that way now. I take the costs into consideration, I absolutely do. But you’re talking about people’s lives.”
This tension – between individual suffering and population-level decision-making – is unavoidable. The government, and those who advise it, must weigh benefits across society, even when the consequences are deeply personal.
There will be no partying in Canterbury this weekend. Many of the university students have gone home; Club Chemistry is closed. It will remain so until Jones-Roberts feels it is safe to open again. The outbreak must be under control, with no new infections being confirmed, she says. “I need to know that we are not giving people the option to do something that is not the best in their best interests.”
There is one question that Duffield is being asked most by her constituents: “When will it be safe?” Followed in quick succession by: “When can we go back to normal?” That’s why, she says, the past week has felt like the Covid-19 pandemic all over again, “because we had no idea. We didn’t know if it would be two weeks, two months. And in fact, it turned out to be more or less two years”.
But this is not Covid. And perhaps the best way to get through the fear and uncertainty that the coming weeks will bring is to remember that. No amount of planning or medicine can prevent every tragedy. Nor can we allow this knowledge to stop us living.
[Further reading: How Paris’s mayor helped the city breathe again]
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