Medical Centre

In an editorial published in the British Medical Journal , we discuss the highly topical issue of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minority groups. With mass Covid-19 vaccination efforts under way in many countries, including the UK, we need to understand and redress the disparities in its uptake. Data to 14 February 2021 show that over 90% of adults in Britain have received or would be likely to accept the covid-19 vaccine if offered. However, surveys have indicated much greater vaccine hesitancy among people from some ethnic minorities. In a UK survey in December 2020, vaccine hesitancy was highest among black, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani groups compared with people from a white ethnic background. The legitimate concerns and information needs of ethnic minority communities must not be ignored, or worse still, labelled as “irrational” or “conspiracy theories.” We need to engage, listen with respect, communicate effectively, and offer practical support to those who have yet t...

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson has set a target of offering a first dose of a covid-19 vaccine to all adults in the UK by the end of July 2021. What do we need to do to achieve this target? The first step is to ensure we have enough vaccines to offer first and second doses to all adults. There are around 53 million people aged 18 and over in the UK. If everyone took up the offer of a vaccination, we would require about 106 million vaccine doses, along with a small amount of vaccine for people under 18 who are classed as clinically extremely vulnerable. Currently, we are using two vaccines in the UK: from AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech. A third vaccine from Moderna has been licensed in the UK but is not yet in use. Other vaccines—such as the candidate from Novavax—are in the late stages of development and approval; and may come into use in the UK by the early summer. The government will need to ensure that these companies can supply enough vaccines for use in the UK to meet its ta...

Vaccination offers the UK the best exit strategy from the covid-19 pandemic. [1] To accomplish this objective, achieving high population coverage of covid-19 vaccination is essential. However, despite the good safety and efficacy of covid-19 vaccines, public scepticism about the vaccines persists. [2]  Vaccine opposition has existed for as long as vaccinations and, despite the public’s increasing scientific sophistication, has been growing across high-income countries, leading the WHO to list it in the top 10 global health threats in 2019. [3,4] In the UK, the covid-19 vaccination programme continues to gather pace, giving the UK a rare pandemic win; however, those prioritised for vaccination represent groups with low vaccine hesitancy rates. There have been many surveys assessing covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. Potentially affecting as many as one in three individuals in the UK, vaccine hesitancy is pervasive, especially amongst young adults and ethnic minorities, threatening to under...

There is increasing discussion about how and when we should relax Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the UK. My view is that we should be guided by data on case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths; and lift restrictions cautiously. In recent weeks, we have seen positive progress on case numbers with the daily number of people with positive Covid-10 tests falling from a peak over 50,000 per day earlier in the year to under 15,000 per day more recently. Hospitalisations and deaths are also falling but will lag behind the decrease in case numbers.  There are reasons to be positive about the future. Vaccination numbers are increasing daily with over 15M people now vaccinated against Covid-19, and administration of second vaccine doses due to start soon, as well as extension of vaccination to younger age groups. We are on target to offer a Covid-19 vaccine to all adults by later in 2021. However, we have seen lower vaccination rates in some groups, such as people from ethnic minorities,...

I was invited to join a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus earlier today when I was questioned on the implementation of the Covid-19 vaccination programme in the UK, vaccine hesitancy and how this can be addressed, and how we can ensure the programme is successfully completed.  The UK has made an excellent start to its Covid-19 vaccination programme and we should build on this success by supporting and investing in local primary care and pharmacy teams. The mass vaccination centres set up by NHS England may have a role but we must ensure that they do not divert staff, funding and vaccines from local vaccination centres run by primary care teams. Local centres can work flexibly and are more accessible for patients.  Finally, vaccine hesitancy is an important issue and we must work locally, as well as nationally, with the public and patients, to address this in the groups where it is highest – such as young adults, ethnic minorities, and people from poor...

In an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , we discuss how the UK can make its schools more Covid-secure. We were very grateful that Louise Voden, Head Teacher of the Nower Hill High School in Middlesex was able to contribute to the paper as a co-author.  Children are more likely than adults to have a mild or asymptomatic infection; hence, Covid-19 infection often goes undetected in children. When symptomatic, children shed the virus in similar quantities to adults and can infect others but it is unclear how infectious children with asymptomatic infections are. Large outbreaks of Covid-19 in schools have not been frequently reported but this may be because school outbreaks are rarely investigated in detail; for example, through the use of mass testing when after a case has been detected in a child, to determine the true infection rate among children in the school. To keep schools open, there is an urgent need to implement more effective on-site mitigat...

 Earlier this week, we learned that more than 10 million people in the UK have now received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, including 90% of people aged 75 and over. All residents of care homes have also now been offered a vaccination. This is excellent news and means that the groups that for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths have now been immunised.  We will start to see the effects of vaccination in the coming weeks once enough time has elapsed for people to develop post-vaccination immunity. In particular, this should result in a reduced burden on the NHS as well as a lower death rate. But although we can be proud about what the vaccination achieved, we also need to remember that the programme is a marathon and not a sprint. There is a lot more work to do yet to complete the programme. As well as continuing to offer first doses of vaccine to people, in April we will need to start offering the delayed second doses of vaccine, which will substantially increase the ...