Skip to main content

The NHS must be fully supported in rolling out the Covid-19 vaccination programme

The news today that the MHRA has approved the AstraZeneca adenoviral ChAdOx1 nCoV-190 vaccine for use in the UK is excellent news for the Covid-19 vaccination programme. The results of the vaccine trial published in the Lancet earlier in December were encouraging, even if the overall efficacy of 70% was lower than the 90-95% being reported for mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The vaccine still prevented serious cases of illness amongst the recipients.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is cheaper than the mRNA vaccines and can be stored in a conventional vaccine fridge. Hence, it is an easier vaccine to use in primary care and community settings, including in low and middle income countries. The most commonly reported adverse reactions from the vaccine were fatigue, headache, feverishness, and myalgia. More serious adverse events were rare and not believed to be directly related to the vaccine.

One caveat for all the Covid-19 vaccines is that we don’t yet know how long the immunity they generate will last. We also don’t yet know if they stop people being infectious. As more data becomes available, we will be able to better answer these important two questions.

Now that the AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved by the MHRA, we need to see it rapidly rolled out by the NHS. The vaccine is highly suited for use in UK primary care as it can be stored in the standard vaccine fridge found in all general practices; and given to patients either opportunistically when they attend for an appointment for another problem or in dedicated vaccination clinics. It can also be much more easily used for people living in care homes and for housebound patients than the mRNA vaccines.

To ensure successful delivery of the vaccination programme, it’s essential that primary care teams and general practices are given all the support they need for the Covid-19 vaccination programme. Now is not the time for penny-pinching or for repeating the many mistakes made in the other parts of the government’s Covnd-19 strategy. We also need the government to be transparent about the amount of vaccine available for use now. Although the government has ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine (enough for all adults in the UK), we need the government to be clear what the timescale is for delivering the vaccine to the NHS and how much vaccine the NHS will be supplied with during the crucial month of January.

Vaccination offers the UK the only way out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rapid delivery of vaccines to target groups and a high uptake of vaccination amongst the public are essential if we are to start to return life in the UK to normal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the difference between primordial prevention and primary prevention?

Primordial prevention and primary prevention are both crucial strategies for promoting health, but they operate at different levels. Primordial prevention aims to address the root causes of health problems and improve the wider determinants of health. It focuses on preventing the emergence of risk factors in the first place by tackling the underlying social, economic, and environmental determinants of health. This involves broad, population-wide interventions such as: Policies that promote healthy food choices: Think about initiatives like taxing sugary drinks to discourage unhealthy consumption, or providing subsidies for fruits and vegetables to make them more accessible. Urban planning that prioritises well-being: This could include creating walkable neighborhoods with safe cycling routes, ensuring access to green spaces for recreation and relaxation, and designing communities that foster social connections. Social programs that address inequality: Initiatives aimed at reducing pov...
Post a Comment
Read more

What makes a good doctor – and who gets to decide?

What Makes a Good Doctor? This is the question that Waseem Jerjes and I explore in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine . It is a key question that underpins the architecture of medical education, clinical practice, regulation, and professional identity. It cannot be answered by regulators, educators, or employers in isolation. It must be answered together – by doctors and patients – revisited throughout a career, and adapted as society and the profession change. Without that shared reflection, the danger is not simply disillusionment, but the erosion of the moral foundations of clinical work. As we enter an era when diagnosis will increasingly involve artificial intelligence and when performance metrics reward volume over value, reclaiming this question as a professional one is imperative. The integrity of our institutions – and of the practitioners within them – depends on reimagining excellence in inclusive, relational terms. A good doctor is not a flawless technician or a f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Relevance Over Recall: Rethinking How AI Uses Clinical Data

Our article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine argues that safe and effective AI in healthcare must incorporate mechanisms that emulate human judgement - down-weighting old, inaccurate or superseded information and prioritising what is recent, clinically relevant and reaffirmed - so that AI supports, rather than disrupts, high-quality patient care.  Clinicians constantly revise, reinterpret and filter past information so that only what is relevant, accurate and timely shapes present-day management decisions; medical records function as dynamic “working tools” rather than fixed archives. By contrast, many AI systems lack this capacity for selective forgetting and often treat all historical data as equally meaningful.  This can lead to outdated or low-confidence diagnoses being repeatedly resurfaced, persistent labels influencing clinical expectations, and irrelevant, long-resolved events cluttering summaries and decision-support outputs. Such indiscriminate recall...
Post a Comment
Read more