gryffron wrote:Julian wrote:If doses of the flu jab were already coming on stream before the strategy for the C-19 boosters was announced then if currently unused vaccination stations are available to give the injection it makes sense in terms of efficiency to try and get as many flu jabs out of the way as possible hence it doesn't surprise me to hear people being contacted now solely to get a flu jab with no mention of a C-19 booster.
I know several elderly people who have already had their winter flu jab, and several others who
should have had it but it was cancelled due to the much publicised delivery problems.
Of course, these would be the same people who would be first in line for a booster. So if the intention is to save money by double jabbing, they're already well behind the curve.
I think that with boosters now confirmed for all of the over 50s, and I think eligibility for the free flu jab is also being extended this year to also include all over 50s, there is still a huge cohort of people who could potentially get the one-in-each-arm treatment still to be processed. My 2nd AZ dose was on 20th May so I won't even be eligible for a booster until 20th November at the earliest. I, a healthy 61 year old at the time, exploited what might have been considered a loophole in the system to book my vaccinations slightly in advance of the official roll-out so I'm fairly early in the timings for my age group, other 60-65 year olds who waited for their GPs to contact them, let alone the 50-somethings, will have to wait longer until their 6-months-after-2nd-dose eligibility date arrives.
I'd guess that not too much potential both-at-once efficiency has been lost so far due to these early flu-vaccine-only appointments once one considers the size of the total everyone-over-50 cohort eligible for both vaccines. Yes, the government is probably a little bit behind the curve but it's not a disaster and also possibly unavoidable. HMG was waiting for the latest results of the Southampton COV-Boost study (
https://www.covboost.org.uk/home) that I read were only made available privately to the decision makers mid/late last week.
As far as I can tell those most up to date COV-Boost results have not been made public yet. I hope they are made public fairly soon. I will take up the offer of a booster shot but it would bug me if, by the time my appointment came due, I knew that there was trial data on efficacy that had not been made public. I assume this is just a case of multiple reviews of the data & findings plus cleaning up the presentation before public release and that it will be in the public domain well before my earliest possible 20th November appointment. Israel should also have a lot more data from its booster efficacy study so I hope that there will be a lot of data by the time they get round to me and that it all continues to look as good as the early Israel data is looking.
- Julian