More need to take up their coronavirus booster jabs
Apathy appears to have infected the latest round of the Covid vaccination programme in Lancashire, with figures showing a sluggish uptake of the autumn booster amongst some of the groups eligible for it.
She also says that some health and social care workers who have recently been infected with Covid are planning to maximise the benefit from their jabs by getting them in the new year – in recognition of the fact that they will currently still have some “natural immunity”, something which she says is “probably a very wise move”.
“We’ve got large cohorts of the population [who] have not had the flu vaccination or not had their Covid boosters – and that is a real worry going into this winter,“ the hospital boss said. Vaccines have been available at over 170 sites in the region this autumn, including at more than 80 “pop-up” facilities. Until last week, there was even an option to have a dose delivered in your own home. However, Jane is nevertheless keen to hear from anyone who feels that their particular needs have not been met by the service that has been on offer.
While Jane stresses that that comment was an “observation” and not the official position of the area’s integrated care board, she says that Covid appears to have fallen off the national agenda to a degree, amid messaging that suggests: “There’s nothing to see here”. “There are, thankfully, two or three generations of people that don’t remember horrible vaccine-preventable diseases [like smallpox and polio]. It Is our elders who remember how awful that they were and [so] they are vaccine believers.
'Rolling back resistance' The NHS in Lancashire and South Cumbria established four groups dedicated to increasing the uptake of the Covid autumn booster in sections of the population amongst whom it was likely to be low – the deprived and isolated, homeless people and asylum seekers, pregnant women and some ethnic minority communities.
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