This is an age of anti-vaccine unreason – and even NHS staff are not immune | Polly Toynbee

When fewer than half of health service workers have taken up the flu vaccine, there is little hope for the rest of us Good news. Edward Jenner ’s rustic thatched hut in his Gloucestershire garden where he conducted his first smallpox vaccination in 1796 has just been saved by English Heritage . Here Jenner gave free vaccinations every week to local people. Here he became the single human being to save more lives than any other person who has ever lived. This triumph of the age of enlightenment, at a time when a third of children died before adulthood, is too easily forgotten. But enlightenment