According to estimates by the WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, just six years ago Samoan uptake of MMR was running at around 90 per cent.

That’s just five per cent shy of the figure virologists cite as necessary to stymie the virus completely – and roughly the same as in Britain. But for the next four years the coverage was allowed to fall, to around only 62 per cent. And then, even under the watch of the WHO and Unicef, came a largely self-inflicted disaster.

It was a lethal mistake that would send two nurses to prison. On July 6 last year, at a 20-bed hospital on the east coast of Savai’i, they administered a powdered version of MMR, which one of the nurses wrongly mixed with an expired anaesthetic. Two 12-month-old children – a girl and a boy – died, hours apart, and in minutes.

Both nurses were arrested. Confessions came quickly. And the reason for the deaths was known to the government within three weeks of the incident, or sooner. But, after suspending MMR as an initial precaution, they left it suspended for almost nine months, as if someone in the ministry of health, on the other side of Ififi Street from the TTM hospital, had forgotten to change the instruction.

In recent weeks, the ministry has offered no explanation. And when I meet the deputy director of health, Gaualofa Matalavea Saaga, to ask permission to visit the hospital, she makes it clear that publicity isn’t welcome. “Having our case blasted out to the world is the last thing we want,” she says.

Although the government has announced that mandatory vaccination would remain the law permanently, the health ministry’s earlier dawdling left MMR uptake falling to less than one third of children vaccinated by the age of two. And, despite a string of warnings about the epidemic in Auckland, little was done about Samoa’s mounting vulnerability until a few weeks before the crisis.