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Showing results for tags 'Vaccination'.
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Content ArticleThe first COVID-19 vaccine outside a clinical trial setting was administered on 8 December 2020. To ensure global vaccine equity, vaccine targets were set by the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility and WHO. However, due to vaccine shortfalls, these targets were not achieved by the end of 2021. Watson et al. aimed to quantify the global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination programmes. The study found that COVID-19 vaccination has substantially altered the course of the pandemic, saving tens of millions of lives globally. However, inadequate access to vaccines in low-income countries has limited the impact in these settings, reinforcing the need for global vaccine equity and coverage.
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Content ArticleA spike in infections every three months seems to be the pattern, but the UK has the power to beat this if we act wisely writes Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, in the article for the Guardian. She suggests the UK should be planning to roll out boosters to the entire population this autumn, using an age and risk factor priority scheme (instead of just to people over 75, those in care homes and those with weakened immune systems: these are the people covered by the current spring booster scheme). Antiviral supply should be put in place in pharmacies and GPs, working towards a “test to treat” scheme where soon after testing positive, those who are in vulnerable and elderly groups, for whom vaccines might be less effective, can get access to effective treatment early on.
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Content ArticleEuropean Union Directive 2010/32/EU legally enforces a set of strategies aimed at preventing sharps injuries and determining the risk of bloodborne infections and psychological distress in healthcare workers. This article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health looks at the results of a national survey conducted in Italy in 2017 and repeated in 2021 to evaluate the progress of the Directive's implementation. The authors assessed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on implementation.
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Content Article
Opposition to vaccines has a long history (26 April 2022)
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Blogs
In January 2019, not long before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Laurent-Henri Vignaud and Françoise Salvadori published what would turn out to be a very timely book, Antivax: Resistance to Vaccines from the 18th Century to the Present Day. In a recent presentation at the French College of General Medicine's 15th Congress of General Medicine, Vignaud, a historian of science, gave examples from the past to show that opposition to vaccines, which has come to light during the COVID-19 pandemic, is neither a recent phenomenon nor specific to France. -
Content ArticleThis report revisits the conclusions of The Health Foundation's Covid-19 impact enquiry, which found that poor health and existing inequalities had left parts of the UK more vulnerable to the virus and had influenced its devastating impact. A year on from the impact inquiry, more than 90% of the UK population have had at least one Covid-19 infection, and 74% of adults had received three vaccinations by April 2022. This report considers: the further direct impact of Covid-19 on health outcomes. the broader implications for social determinants of health. the extent to which previously highlighted risks to health have been addressed. the implications for the country of ‘living with Covid-19’.
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Covid-19 has posed a huge challenge to the delivery of safe care, both when infection rates were at their highest levels and in terms of its long-term impact on health and social care systems.[1] The pandemic has magnified existing patient safety issues, created new ones, and exposed safety gaps which require systemic responses. This month the World Health Organization (WHO) has published a new report, Implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for patient safety: A rapid review.[2] The review aims to create a greater understanding of the impact of the pandemic on patient safety, particularly in relation to diagnostic services, treatment and care management. In this blog, Patient Safety Learning, one of the international organisations who contributed to this review, provides an overview and reflections on some the key themes and issues raised in this review. -
Content ArticleThe US's response to monkeypox fails to put patients and their care at its centre, writes Eric Kutscher in the BMJ opinion article. As a primary care and addiction medicine physician, Kutscher has been dismayed by the number of patients he has treated over the past few weeks who’ve been infected with the vaccine-preventable monkeypox virus. Most have been in considerable pain and required strong analgesics, with some unable to even sit because of their skin lesions. Yet for many, the most agonising and scarring aspect of their infection is not their physical symptoms, but the complete removal of their humanity by the medical response to monkeypox. As a medical and public health community, we are exhausted after Covid-19, and our compassion fatigue is showing in our policies and procedures for monkeypox. The spread of the virus to previously non-endemic countries was only recently declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization. Unlike with Covid-19, this is not a novel virus—we have the appropriate diagnostic testing, treatment, and even vaccines that we need. Yet, just as we have failed to deploy these tools to assist in outbreaks in African nations, we are now also failing our patients from a sexual minority—patients who are already underserved and justifiably mistrusting of a medical system.
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Content ArticleThis article in The BMJ examines the case for vaccinating children under five against Covid, following the US recently recommending that children aged six months to five years should receive Covid-19 vaccines. It looks at the risks and benefits of vaccination for young children, citing recent Moderna and Pfizer trials. It highlights that children are more likely than adults to experience asymptomatic Covid-19 or very mild illness, and are much less likely to have severe disease requiring hospital admission. But for children with underlying health conditions, such as long term neurological disease, vaccination may be beneficial in preventing severe disease.
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Content ArticleThis report examines the approaches and key decisions taken by UK governments during the pandemic and the public health measures they introduced. It assesses whether these choices were timely, appropriate, and proportionate to deal with the threat and impact of COVID-19.
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Content ArticleIn this opinion piece for The Guardian, Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh discusses the global threat of monkeypox—a virus that causes fever, swollen lymph nodes and distinctive rashes on the face, palms, the soles of the feet and genitalia. The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated the recent outbreak of monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern. Professor Sridhar highlights the need to take a collaborative approach across borders to ensure the outbreak is brought under control. She outlines that the most effective strategy in preventing the virus spreading further is to protect the group most at risk from the virus—men who have sex with men (MSM)—through vaccination.
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Content ArticleThe Government’s aim throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been to protect the lives and livelihoods of citizens across the UK. This document sets out how the Government has and will continue to protect and support citizens by: enabling society and the economy to open up more quickly than many comparable countries; using vaccines; and supporting the NHS and social care sector. It also sets out how England will move into a new phase of managing COVID-19. The Devolved Administrations will each set out how they will manage this transition in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The global pandemic is not yet over and the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) is clear there is considerable uncertainty about the path that the pandemic will now take in the UK. This document therefore also sets out how the Government will ensure resilience, maintaining contingency capabilities to deal with a range of possible scenarios.
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Content ArticleIn this episode of 'Better Never Stops', Virginia Mason Institute Senior Partner Melissa Lin interviews Dana Nelson-Peterson, Vice President of Nursing Operations at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, who shares what happens when you trust a management system and improvement process to solve your toughest challenges. Dana shares her story of leading a critical part of Virginia Mason’s Covid response.
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Content ArticleAs the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 has reached phase 3 clinical trials, concerns are increasing about the low rates of trial participation in important subgroups, including Black communities. Recent data show that although Black people make up 13% of the US population, they account for 21% of deaths from COVID-19 but only 3% of enrollees in vaccine trials. This problem threatens both the validity and the generalisability of the trial results and is of particular concern in vaccine trials, in which differences in lifetime environmental exposures can result in differences in immunologic responses that could affect both safety and efficacy. Despite long-standing calls from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to improve the participation of underrepresented subgroups in drug trials, the problem persists. Warren et al., in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, explore what the barriers are to greater participation of Black people in COVID-19 trials.
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Content ArticleThis article explains what herd immunity is and what the World Health Organization (WHO)'s position is on herd immunity as a way of fighting COVID-19.
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Content ArticleLaunched at the end of April 2020, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator brings together governments, scientists, businesses, civil society, and philanthropists and global health organisations. These organisations have joined forces to speed up an end to the pandemic by supporting the development and equitable distribution of the tests, treatments and vaccines the world needs to reduce mortality and severe disease, restoring full societal and economic activity globally in the near term, and facilitating high-level control of COVID-19 disease in the medium term.
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Content ArticleSlow-lane logistics shouldn’t stymie fast-track science, says head of UK government’s Vaccine Taskforce, Kate Bingham, in this Nature article. Kate was appointed chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce in May. The main job of this Taskforce is to identify, manufacture and develop the most promising pandemic vaccines and deliver them rapidly to the populations that need them. COVID-19 is an opportunity to create a permanent system for supplying vaccines for future pandemics, quickly and safely; this process must become as routine and reliable as crafting the yearly influenza vaccine, says Kate. Time and again, outstanding science has been slowed down by the ‘boring stuff’ — practicalities. That includes delays in manufacturing scale-up and legal approvals slowing pivotal US trials of one of my UK company’s potentially life-saving drugs, or progress hampered by logistics, regulatory disagreements and inadequate data disclosure. Often, the problem is not the science or the clinical trials, but the infrastructure. We must take pains now to make sure this does not stall future pandemic vaccines.
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Content ArticleA number of posts on Facebook and Twitter are making a number of unfounded claims about government changes to how vaccines are introduced in the UK. These claims are misleading and can cause fear. Some of these posts imply that unlicensed vaccines are untested, which is not the case. An “unlicensed” vaccine for COVID-19 or anything else, does not mean it’s not been tested. Any vaccine rolled out to the public, unlicensed or not, still has to go through extensive clinical trials. This would include a COVID-19 vaccine. Licensing happens after the vaccine has gone through all three phases of pre-launch trials, which usually means the vaccine has already been tested on thousands of adults. Licensing is when experts within the national Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (or the EU regulators, up to the end of the transition period) review the results of the trials. The standards of vaccines generally have to be much higher than those for medication to treat illnesses, as vaccines are usually given to healthy people to prevent disease.The government can already roll-out unlicensed (but not untested) vaccines during a public health emergency, and the government consultation is proposing to clarify the rules around doing this. Here, Full Fact outlines what the government consultation document proposes doing. Full Fact is the UK’s independent fact checking charity.
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Content ArticleLeaflets and a poster aimed at providing information on influenza (flu) and vaccination.
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Content ArticleMore than 1·8 million lives have been lost due to COVID-19. Two frontrunner vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech promise some relief, with data suggesting 95% efficacy,1 and have been granted emergency use authorisations in several countries. In an open letter responding to these developments, participants in COVID-19 vaccine trials argued that those who received placebos should be unmasked and given priority access to authorised vaccines. The letter cited the American Medical Association's Code of Medical Ethics, which highlights the importance of minimising the time research participants spend in a placebo group. Fulfilling these requests could help to foster trust in medicine and research, reward those who take risks for the many, and prevent future harm from COVID-19 for these participants. However, granting these requests also comes with tradeoffs and highlights competing interests inherent in vaccine development. Importantly, these requests also reveal shortcomings in bioethical resources, particularly clinical equipoise conceptualisations. Friesen et al. discuss this further in this Lancet correspondence.
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Content ArticleInside the US Trump administration, sensible ideas for how to manage a massive, unprecedented distribution of vaccinations were no match for bureaucratic knife fighting, gung ho hubris, and a knee-jerk aversion to strong federal action.
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Content ArticleVaccination is the single most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from COVID-19. A national immunisation campaign has been underway since early December 2020. All vaccines and medicines have some side effects. These side effects need to be continuously balanced against the expected benefits in preventing illness. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)'s role is to continually monitor safety during widespread use of a vaccine. They have in place a proactive strategy to do this. They also work closely with our public health partners in reviewing the effectiveness and impact of the vaccines to ensure the benefits continue to outweigh any possible side effects. Part of their monitoring role includes reviewing reports of suspected side effects. Any member of the public or health professional can submit suspected side effects through the Yellow Card scheme. The nature of Yellow Card reporting means that reported events are not always proven side effects. Some events may have happened anyway, regardless of vaccination. This is particularly the case when millions of people are vaccinated, and especially when most vaccines are being given to the most elderly people and people who have underlying illness.
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Content ArticleA few weeks into the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, many health care workers across the US are less than eager to roll up their sleeves for this new shot, with roughly three in ten health care workers express hesitancy about getting the vaccine. To address these concerns, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement have worked with partners to develop a guide for conversations with nursing home staff about vaccine hesitancy. The suggestions can be easily modified for discussions with any health care workers.
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Content ArticleThis report to Congress details a strategy to achieve the principal purpose and objective of Operation Warp Speed (OWS): ensuring that every American who wants to receive a COVID-19 vaccine can receive one, by delivering safe and effective vaccine doses to the American people beginning January 2021.
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Content ArticleThe National COVID-19 Vaccination Strategy outlines Ireland’s high-level plan for safe, effective and efficient vaccination of the population, while safeguarding continued provision of health and social care services. The Strategy was prepared by the High-Level Task Force on COVID-19 Vaccination.
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Content ArticleIn mid-December, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorisation (EUA) to both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has received numerous voluntary reports of COVID-19 vaccine errors or hazards through the ISMP National Vaccine Errors Reporting Program (VERP), the ISMP National Consumer Medication Errors Reporting Program (C-MERP), and via email correspondence from professional colleagues. This article from ISMP highlights a few of the missteps happening across the nation and internationally, from vaccine dilution errors to look-alike product mix-ups. There is much to be gleaned from these reports, as the same types of errors are likely happening globally, and similar risks exist in most settings. They conclude with safe practice recommendations to help prevent these types of errors in your practice setting.
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