Should the UK offer meningitis B vaccine to all 15-year-olds?

There was no real contest here — three in four voters on the floor wanted MenB rolled out to all 15-year-olds, and the age curve tells a story of near-unanimous instinct at both ends of life, with the youngest cohort backing it to a person and the over-65s following close behind. What's striking is where the doubt actually sat: not among the old or the young, but squarely in middle age.

The 45-54 group, those most likely to be signing the consent forms for their own teenagers, split exactly down the middle, a sharper fracture than anywhere else in the sample. That's not scepticism about vaccines in the abstract — it's the group with the most direct stake in the decision, weighing a genuine outbreak risk against the now-familiar unease about medical intervention in one's own children. A modest gender gap ran the same way, with women markedly cooler on the idea than men, echoing that same parental caution rather than any broader ideological divide.

The result sits at the intersection of two live fault lines in British public health: the return of once-rare infectious diseases as a policy trigger, and the long shadow Covid has cast over vaccine trust generally. Both surfaced directly in the arguments voters themselves rewarded.

The top Yes case leaned on the first, warning that "old diseases are returning from 3rd world countries" and that a "full spectrum of vaccines should be offered." The most-respected No voice invoked the second, arguing there was little point handing "vaccine conglomerates the free cash," given "the scepticism and damage that the Covid vax caused globally."

A decisive verdict, then, but one shadowed by exactly the generation asked to act on it.