The suspension of a dengue vaccine programme in the Philippines has caused trust in vaccinations to dramatically drop across the island nation, a study has found.

In 2015, over 80 per cent of people in the Philipines strongly agreed that vaccines were safe and effective. The latest polling, published in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, found that just 20 per cent of people agreed in 2018.

“We were surprised by how dramatic the drop was,” said Professor Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “The whole political saga has spilled over to question vaccines and science more broadly.”

The Philipines has a high incidence of dengue and, in 2016, it became one of the first countries to launch a mass vaccination of children using the drug Dengvazia, made by the French drugs giant Sanofi.

However, in November 2017, Sanofi released new data which showed that the vaccine - while protective for children who had previously been exposed to the virus - increased the long term risk of hospitalisation in those who had not.

By this point, the vaccine had been given to more than 800,000 schoolchildren - and 14 had died from the mosquito-borne disease, sparking a national scandal including accusations of "mass murder and plunder".