Ask anyone in Britain who lived through the 1950s what summer used to mean, and alongside memories of sunshine and school holidays, you will often hear something else. Fear that the season’s warmth also brought polio – a waterborne disease that could leave a healthy child paralysed, or worse. That fear is gone now, and we so rarely stop to ask why. The answer is vaccines, political will, and decades of coordinated global effort. All of which are now at risk.

This week, poliovirus was reported in London’s wastewater. It was also detected in January. This disease is not history, yet just last week, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office ended all direct funding to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), the international partnership with the best chance of finishing the disease for good. I understand the fiscal pressures facing the government. Difficult choices must be made. However, this particular choice is, I believe, profoundly short-sighted for the world’s most vulnerable children, and for Britain itself.

When the GPEI was established in 1988, polio paralysed more than 1,000 children every single day across 125 countries. Since then, the GPEI – a partnership between the World Health Organisation (WHO), UNICEF, Rotary International, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Gates Foundation, US Centres for Disease Control and national governments including our own – has helped bring that number down by 99.9 per cent. Twenty million people who might otherwise have been paralysed are walking today.

Having successfully eliminated polio at home, Britain has been a leader in the fight for global eradication from the start. Over nearly four decades, the UK has not only provided reliable financial support to GPEI, but also technical expertise and political leadership. That investment has helped protect more than three billion children. Today, we are, genuinely, close to finishing eradication of this terrible disease.

The wild polio virus persists in just Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the variant polio virus in fragile pockets of countries across Africa, the Middle East, and South-East Asia. In 2025, GPEI reached 440 million children with vaccines. In many areas, GPEI vaccination campaigns are often the only contact families have with any form of healthcare at all.

If that feels remote from life in Harrow, or anywhere else in Britain, consider the evidence closer to home. Poliovirus was detected in UK wastewater as recently as this year. Measles is already returning to communities across the country as childhood immunisation rates slip.

In recent years, we have seen how easily polio can return to countries long polio-free. A child in Gaza was paralysed by polio in 2024 for the first time in two decades after war disrupted the health system. And in 2022, an unvaccinated man in the United States was also paralysed by the virus – both reminders that polio is just a plane ride away. The UK’s protection has always depended on the strength of vaccination coverage worldwide. Not just our own.

This is where the government’s position – that polio eradication will be funded through Gavi and WHO – falls short. Neither Gavi nor WHO alone can replicate what the full GPEI partnership does, in particular the rapid response to outbreaks. Moreover, the UK has also reduced its core funding to both WHO and Gavi as part of the overall reduction of funding for international development. Any way you paint it, this decision means less money towards ridding the world of polio.

The logic of prevention over response has been proven time and again. Pound for pound, finishing polio now costs a fraction of what managing its return would demand in money and lives. Stepping back from GPEI – when we are this close – is not fiscal caution. It is abandoning our investment and children at home and abroad.

I recognise that the government has no easy options, but I urge ministers to look again at this decision. In Britain, children and their parents no longer fear that swimming on a summer’s day might result in paralysis, even death. We will regret it if we let a generation of progress, and the chance to end this disease forever, slip away.

Bob Blackman is the Member of Parliament for Harrow East

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