“There were rumours,” reflects Rosie Duffield. The Canterbury MP, whose constituency includes the University of Kent, has many friends who work in higher education locally and have children who are of school and university age. On Sunday, March 15, her phone did not stop ringing. “I just thought, maybe someone has meningitis – but I didn’t know.” Messages transmitted among young people can often be exaggerated or misunderstood.
But confirmation came that evening from a BBC reporter: two young men in Canterbury – one a student at the University of Kent – had died of the disease. “My immediate thought was: what families? And, oh my God, how horrible.” Health Secretary Wes Streeting was in touch later that night and put Duffield through to health officials. Since then she has been in close contact.
Within hours, what had started as a rumor became something else: a test not only 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 fears of the Covid era still shape the response to even relatively rare diseases.
Louise Jones-Roberts heard from the UK Health Safety Agency (UKHSA) on Sunday afternoon. She owns two nightclubs in Canterbury: Club Chemistry and Tokyo Tea Rooms. They contacted him with a direct message on the club’s Instagram account. There was a confirmed case of meningitis in someone who had been at the Chemistry Club, the message said, and she needed to contact the agency.
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“Because I’m a mother and I know about meningitis, I said, ‘Okay, we need to tell as many people as possible what the symptoms are and what to do.
As staff compiled a post, worse news arrived: a 21-year-old University of Kent student and 18-year-old schoolgirl Juliette Kenny had died. “It was just awful,” says Jones-Roberts. We now know that some confirmed cases had been at the club a week ago. Anyone who visited between March 5 and 7 was offered preventative antibiotics from March 16, with vaccines available later. About 2,000 people attended the Chemistry Club during those nights.
The UKHSA’s approach – reaching out to a nightclub via Instagram – initially seemed unusual to Jones-Roberts. “But actually, it was a really intelligent thing to do,” she says. “If they had sent the email, we might not have seen it until Monday.” All 91 employees received antibiotics within 24 hours. Two remain in hospital in stable condition.
As word spread in Canterbury, the atmosphere changed. By Monday morning, the explosion was national news.
“Immediately it felt like we were back in the early days of Covid,” says Duffield. Some students stopped attending lectures even before the official instruction was changed. Many started wearing masks. “Most of the young people I know are almost isolated by default. A lot of them don’t want to go to school.” This is a scared generation, says Duffield: “So much of their life was affected by Covid, and they’re immediately going back to that panic.”
Even the parents were worried. “They’re asking me, ‘Should my child go to school?’ And I’m saying, ‘Technically, the advice is that it’s completely fine. It’s not Covid. They should have had very close contact.’
That assurance is often not enough – as Duffield understands. She tells parents that it is up to them whether or not they keep their children home from school. “I’m not going to tell them to do something they think is unsafe,” she says.
Duffield is right: meningitis is not Covid. While airborne, it is transmitted only through close and prolonged contact. It is much less contagious and relatively rare. We will not see wide national coverage and thousands of deaths across the country.
However, it is extremely serious. It is estimated that one in ten who contract meningitis B – the type identified in Kent – will die. But unlike Covid, it is well understood. There are effective ways to treat it and limit its spread if it is 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 fear on social media. In addition, the need to blame and find fault.
Jones-Roberts suddenly found herself at the center of the storm. A reporter asked her if she felt responsible for the deaths. The question “blindsided” him. “Logically I know I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, but she still feels guilty. “I feel terrible for the parents.”
There has also been criticism of the speed of the response. However, those involved in public health say this misrepresents how outbreaks are identified.
“What the critics don’t understand is the time it takes to realize you have a cluster,” says Robert Dingwall, emeritus professor at Nottingham Trent University and a former adviser to the government 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 about when to announce – especially if the details have not been confirmed in the laboratory.
“We’re still seeing echoes from the pandemic,” Dingwall says, pointing to both “unreasonable public health expectations” and the mistaken belief that medicine can eliminate all risk.
Lucy Easthope, who advises governments on emergency planning and disaster response, puts it more bluntly: “Everyone is on edge.” Public fear is higher and confidence lower than it was a decade ago. Both, she says, are perfectly understandable and not without reason. But this makes the work of those dealing with major health events extremely difficult. Doctors in Kent have described being overwhelmed by people seeking reassurance. “Everyone with a headache or a cold is coming in to get checked out,” wrote a general practitioner“Which I fully understand, it’s a terrible disease. But now we’re overwhelmed. completely overwhelmed.”
Both Easthope and Dingwall are critical of using the word “unprecedented” to describe the outbreak. Clusters of meningitis, particularly in student populations, are not uncommon, they say. “A meningitis outbreak is a classic scenario in a university (emergency) exercise,” says Easthope. “It’s something we plan for.” Before the pandemic, universities would make sure incoming students were alerted to the dangers.
But Kent’s blast is unusual in its speed, size and high concentration. Until Friday, March 20, 29 cases of meningitis B (MenB) have been recorded.all related to Canterbury. That has puzzled even seasoned public health officials, who say they are doing everything they can to figure 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 occurred over much longer periods. In that case, 65 cases were recorded over four and a half years.
However, the challenge is not only medical. It’s communicative: how to convey seriousness without scaring people. There was a marked change in language during the week – more explanation, calmer tone, all aimed at reassuring thousands of distraught youngsters and their parents.
“We will expect the number of cases to increase in the coming days, certainly at least until the weekend,” Wes Streeting told the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday night. “We can 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 about one case a day. “What I don’t want is for people to worry unnecessarily.”
Nowhere is this challenge—of communicating relative risk—more apparent than in the MenB vaccine debate.
Meningitis cases have declined dramatically since the late 1990s due to successful vaccination programs. In England, cases fell from more than 2,500 in 1998-99 to 378 in 2024-25. MenB remains the most common type.
The MenB vaccine (introduced in 2015) is only routinely given to infants, however, not to teenagers or young adults – despite their known high-risk profile. The decision was based on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI), an independent scientific and expert committee that advises the government, which concluded that wider coverage 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 become severely ill with the disease. The protection also seems to fade after a few years.
These decisions are based on cost-benefit analysis – a standard feature of health care policy and which until the pandemic was “non-controversial”, argues Easthope. Resources are finite and funding one intervention means diverting money from another. “JCVI are very conscious of the fact that it’s public money,” says Dingwall. “If they recommend a vaccine, it’s 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 guidelines. This too is routine; recommendations evolve as new evidence emerges. This happened recently with chicken poxfor example: having previously not recommended a national vaccine program in 2009, the JCVI changed its mind in 2023 as more information came to light.
To those directly affected, however, such calculations can seem abstract, trivial, and even offensive.
Speaking from an unusually quiet University of Kent campus, Jones-Roberts reflects on her shift in perspective. She has become one of a growing number of voices calling for a national MenB vaccine program for teenagers and young adults. “Two weeks ago I would have agreed with the cost-benefit argument,” she said. “I don’t feel that way now. I consider the costs, absolutely. But you’re talking about people’s lives.”
This tension – between individual suffering and population-level decision-making – is inevitable. Government, and those who advise it, must weigh the benefits to society as a whole, even when the consequences are deeply personal.
There will be no party in Canterbury this weekend. Many of the university students have gone home; Club Chemistry is closed. It will remain that way until Jones-Roberts feels it is safe to reopen. The spread should be under control, with no new infections confirmed, she says. “I need to know that we’re not giving people the opportunity to do something that’s not in their best interest.”
It’s a question Duffield is being asked more and more by her constituents: “When will she be safe?” Followed in 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 was going to be two weeks, two months. And actually, 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 this. No amount of planning or medicine can prevent every tragedy. Nor can we let this knowledge stop us from living.
(Further reading: As mayor of Paris he helped the city breathe again)
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