With winter approaching, we’re getting into the flu season – and right on cue, NHS England has announced that every primary school child in England is to be offered vaccination against it. This year’s vaccination campaign will be the biggest ever, with 25 million people being offered free vaccines, including 600,000 schoolchildren aged between 10 and 11.
Children, who are given the delightful term “super-spreaders”, are particularly liable to infect others, so all of them aged between two and 11 will be offered the nasal spray vaccine in the coming weeks.
Fears that a no-deal Brexit would jeopardise flu jab supplies have also been eased. Although there is a delay in supplies for those who are under 65 (older people and younger patients with chronic conditions are targeted with different jabs), most of the vaccines needed will arrive in the UK before 31 October.
All this is excellent news. Flu is often thought of as nothing more than a week of feeling rotten, but it can be life-threatening, particularly for older people and anyone with an acute illness like cancer or underlying chronic health conditions, like me.
In 2018 I developed flu complications that left me unable to breathe or move and on a ventilator for months. It’s left me with life-changing fatigue and pain, but in many ways I was lucky. Last year 1,700 people died of the flu – despite the fact that this was a relatively mild strain – and further hospital admissions put even greater pressure on an already overstretched NHS.
And yet the solution isn’t simply making the jabs more available – it’s ensuring people actually have them. There’s long been an issue with low uptake of free flu jabs in England, and there’s a fear that immunisations are an increasingly hard sell to the public. The UK, like much of the west, is battling an anti-vaxxing movement in which social media has become a gateway for scare stories and quackery. Diseases such as measles are on the rise in England, with the UK recently losing its measles-free status with the World Health Organization because a growing number of people believe dangerous myths about vaccines.
By comparison, the risk of flu is even easier to downplay. When I post a pro-flu jab link on Twitter I routinely face a response from anti-vaxxers: anything from claims that the jab once gave them a terrible flu (the jab can never give the flu, but you may have picked up germs at the GP surgery getting it) to ideas that a special diet of vegetables will do the trick instead. Others point to how the jab doesn’t immunise against every flu strain – and while that’s true, it makes no sense to reject something that gives you a good chunk of protection because it doesn’t safeguard you against everything. The year I developed flu complications, I had been vaccinated. But while it didn’t protect me that time, it had done for more than 25 years previously. I’ve had the jab ever since I was a child, and it undoubtedly helped me stay well through many winters.
The social media bots designed to spread misinformation about vaccines are a particular danger, but many online are genuine people who have internalised anxieties – fears that the chatter of Facebook and Twitter easily reinforces. The backlash against professional expertise, coupled with the insistence that personal opinion trumps established facts – which we’ve seen on everything from Brexit to the climate crisis – can just as seriously chip away at consensus about vaccine safety.
Even those who are likely to believe the science do not necessarily see the jab as a priority in their busy day. It can seem hard to get an appointment at your GP surgery, but many hold flu jab clinics and you can also go to high-street chemists to be vaccinated. To get a picture of what we’re up against, we only have to consider that healthcare workers, perhaps the group you’d most expect to be up on the need for a jab, are still not all protected (while some NHS trusts achieved 90% of staff being vaccinated last year, others only managed 40% to 50%).
No one who distrusts vaccines will be won over by bullying insults or dismissing them as stupid – but support and well-funded education drives would help. Worryingly, there has been a drop in spending on flu publicity campaigns in recent years as the government’s austerity measures have been stepped up.
The balance between freedom as an individual and responsibility as a member of society is never easy, but surely no one has the right to put others at risk. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, was said to be “looking very seriously” at making vaccinations compulsory for state school pupils for diseases such as measles – although No 10 rowed back on it.
When it comes to flu, greater focus must be put on NHS staff as well as workers in older people’s care homes: for instance, the former chief medical officer for England even recommends all healthcare workers who refuse the jab should wear a lapel badge to warn patients they aren’t protected. Such a solution isn’t perfect – on a crowded ward with few staff, you can’t pick and choose your nurse – but is worth trialling. Compulsory vaccinations for all NHS and care staff are a valid last resort. Those of us who are vulnerable to the worst effects of flu should at the least be able to feel safe around the very people meant to help us.
Whether it’s schoolchildren or health workers, vaccine take-up is a pressing public health issue. This winter, let’s hope it’s facts that start spreading.
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
