Official data published this week revealed that take-up of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine among children in England fell to a 15-year low. At the same time, the Government announced that from next January, the chickenpox vaccine (varicella) will be offered to all children in England for the first time.

Varicella will be administered along with MMR to create a combined MMRV vaccine. The question is whether such a strategy could lead to a further reduction in take-up.

In general, chickenpox infection represents a much smaller risk to children than, say, measles. As a result, the varicella vaccination is unlikely to be seen as a priority for most parents. Some will consider the potential side effects and conclude that they do not want their children to have this vaccine at all.

Many parents are already wary of the MMR vaccine for various reasons, ranging from moral objections to the use of cell lines derived from aborted fetuses, to concerns about the safety of administering combined vaccines.

There is indeed evidence that MMRV can increase the risk of febrile seizures among infants relative to the MMR on its own. The JCVI statement on childhood varicella notes that the absolute risk from combining the vaccines is low (about one additional seizure for every 2,300 vaccinations) but here is the problem: trust in messaging around vaccinations has been severely undermined by the unethical way Covid vaccines were promoted.

In 2021, the Government introduced draconian policies such as mandates and vaccine passports aimed at pressuring young people to get vaccinated. And they followed up by rolling out the vaccine to schoolchildren, despite the evidence that for most young people, the risks from vaccination almost certainly outweighed any plausible benefit. Unethical as they were, such policies may have increased vaccination take-up in the short run, but the consequence was that a significant proportion of the population no longer trusts official reassurances on vaccine safety.

This loss of trust may well mean that the rollout of the chickenpox vaccine results in a further reduction in take-up of the combined vaccine. If this is indeed the unintended consequence of the latest policy, the public health response will be critical.

One possibility is that officials will decide to ramp up pressure on parents to get their children vaccinated and encourage politicians to crack down on online “misinformation”. We might even see renewed calls for childhood vaccines to be made mandatory. If officials take that route, the result will of course be an even greater erosion of trust.

An alternative approach would be to try to rebuild trust by increasing transparency about vaccine side effects and providing parents with more choice and options. This might include trying to accommodate parents who, for whatever reason, want some but not all of the four vaccines for their children, by offering the alternative of single doses.

Trusting parents to make the best decisions for their children should not be a radical concept. The problem is that such an approach would require public health officials (and indeed politicians) to learn from their failures during Covid. From the evidence we have so far, we should perhaps not hold our breath.

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David Paton is a Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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