Dr Alison George, of the Doctors’ Association UK (DAUK) GP team, criticised the decision not to ‘protect staff health’.

She was responding to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) guidance that the age at which people are offered an NHS Covid vaccine should rise from 75 to 80 in autumn 2027.

Reducing vaccination

Dr George said: “Reducing vaccination to such a small group gives the impression to the public that we do not need to worry about Covid any more and that it can only harm the very oldest and most vulnerable in society.

“This is not the case at all and will do nothing to encourage members of the public to protect themselves and those around them from a disease that is spread easily.

“From an NHS staff member perspective it just confirms that DHSC and NHSE leaders have zero interest in protecting staff health.”

Dr Steve Taylor, DAUK GP co-lead, spoke to the BMJ about the guidance.

Vulnerable and marginalised

He said: “This issue with a raised age group again gives the wrong impression of the failure of the NHS to care for the vulnerable and marginalised.

“It also means some NHS staff will feel that their health doesn’t matter. This feels like cost cutting rather than genuine choice over health benefits and certainly affects staff at risk.

“As DAUK has said previously, it will backfire, with staff sickness and absences. This should be a choice for staff and older patients.”

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An unvaccinated heart transplant patient in the US is making headlines for being rejected from the list, in part, because of his views on receiving the Covid vaccine.

The irony here is striking. A heart transplant is a very complex medical procedure, only made possible because of the advancement of science.

Organs are given to patients that are more likely to survive and live a long, healthy life. People who have done all they can to receive such a precious thing, another chance.

In an ideal world, we would have thousands of organs to give to every person who needs them. However, as we all know, we don’t live in a perfect world. There are thousands of people who desperately need organ transplants and have had their Covid jabs.

Receiving an organ transplant is a last resort and supply does not meet demand. Patients have to go through an extensive process and meet several criteria to be eligible.

For a transplant to work and not be rejected, patients must be on medication to suppress immunity. What that means is that for unvaccinated people, the chances of survival if Covid is contracted after the transplant are very low. If this particular patient did not take the vaccine, the scenario is similar to sending a soldier to war without ammunition.

I understand there is freedom of choice and patient autonomy in medicine. However, there are also actions and consequences. If a patient does not want antibiotics for a very serious infection, that is their choice. That choice comes with the high possibility that they will die because of that infection.

There are three ethical principles in the allocation of human organs, which are utility, justice and respect for persons. Utility is about maximising the benefit of the organ given. Justice is ensuring organs are distributed fairly and respect for persons is about patient autonomy.

Considering there are more than 106,000 patients on the US national transplant waiting list, when an organ becomes available, it will be given to whoever is likely to need it most but also who is likely to survive the longest with it.

Many criteria have to be fulfilled before recipients go on that waiting list. They have to be of a certain BMI, a non-smoker, not have active cancer, be below a certain age, not abuse drugs or alcohol and show that they will adhere to the post-transplant medication regimen.

Respect and autonomy means giving the patient the options they have and then respecting the choices they make. But choices almost always come with consequences. One cannot refuse chemotherapy for cancer, then expect to stay alive for 100 years. It’s the same principle in this case: if a patient wants a heart transplant, they have to maximise their chances of survival and that includes having the Covid jabs.

Donor hearts do not come by every day and a heart transplant is a big deal. These are not easy decisions to make, but patients cannot pick and choose what criteria they want to fulfil. This case is a tragic waste if the person who is drowning won’t accept the life jacket thrown their way in favour of upholding their beliefs around vaccination.

Dr Elissa Abi-Raad is a junior doctor and committee member of the Doctors’ Association UK. 

single swear word summed up the feeling in my GP group chat as they went on to alert me of the Government’s announcement on Sunday to deliver a third Covid-19 booster to all adults who want one by the end of the year.

My heart sank. I understood my colleagues’ dismay as I learned of the plan to ‘pause’ routine care to prioritise the boosters. We are all too aware of the current backlogs. Waiting lists have reached record highs as nearly six million people wait, while GPs see patients deteriorate, only to need increased care and more attention from the NHS. Meanwhile, hospitals continue to struggle with capacity.

We’re all worried there’s very little resilience within the system and GPs will still be asked to soldier on despite increasing pressures.

Throughout the pandemic GPs have been grossly undermined for managing this workload and maintaining safe working practices for both patients and staff. We’ve not fully recovered from this, and the distrust it has built makes the job much harder – for some untenable.

Colleagues routinely report ‘so much anger’ from the very people they are trying to help. It’s mis-directed and continues to be fuelled by our leaders under the guise of face-to-face appointments. I long for our politicians to admit how complex the issues are around our broken healthcare system. Instead, we see GPs flitting from being the scapegoats to the solution at the whim of a press release. The impact on morale is evident and GPs are, understandably, leaving in their droves.

So why are we not saying no to this disruption? The Omicron variant is much more contagious and it’s evading the vaccine and natural immunity – but less so with a third booster. Pfizer recently announced there will be four billion BNT162b2 vaccines produced – what we currently use – and this formula is not expected to change as they’re not able to adapt to new variants and scale up fast enough.

The latest report from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre shows that just over half of Covid ICU admissions in the last two months were in those who were double vaccinated. Omicron is only thought to have spread within our population in the last few weeks, so this may not simply be attributed to a new variant. Simply put, this booster programme is our best chance of more of us remaining well and out of hospitals.

Mitigations beyond vaccines may be even more important with a rapidly growing anti-vax movement. Mitigations beyond vaccines may be even more important with a rapidly growing anti-vax movement, which has surged by millions and this could have ramifications to all of our vaccine programmes. The success of vaccines depends on herd immunity.

There are whispers that Test and Trace will continue until 2025 – a good hint life with coronavirus is here to stay. It’s time to embrace this as our normal for our own sanity. The Doctors’ Association UK supports normalised mask wearing with their #MaskUp campaign and perhaps splurge on the best perfume infused alcohol gel.

GPs will, I’m sure, again heroically deliver on this booster programme but the cost has to be levelled with long-term resilience building. More people will be in dire need of care as soon as this pause reverts to play and the GPs that are left to pick up the pieces may not be able to sustain this without expecting much better working environments. This includes professional respect, a stronger focus on other safeguards against the virus and future pandemics.

We need to embrace mitigations that don’t simply build on the shoulders of a very worn workforce that have simply been trying to do their best through the pandemic.

Perhaps it’s time we come round to the idea of what responsibility we can take and ask for more non-vaccine future proofing, in the hope that we can get on with our lives.

Dr Yasotha Browne is a GP and Diversity Lead with the Doctors’ Association UK

Read the piece in Mail Plus here

Figures released by NHS England last week showed that one in six intensive-care patients is an unvaccinated pregnant woman – highlighting the bleak consequences of not getting jabbed. I’m a GP, and at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, I had the Covid-19 vaccine at 29 weeks pregnant.

But let’s not pretend this is an easy decision.

At first, despite being all for a vaccination, I was very undecided about rolling up my sleeve for something so new while pregnant. When UK GPs rolled out the vaccination programme last winter, initial guidance from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) was that pregnant women weren’t to be given the vaccine – so I accepted that I wouldn’t be getting it. As the evidence built up, guidance was updated, and pregnant women at risk of exposure were able to have it. I realised I did want that protection for myself and for my family.

An estimated 60,000 lives have been saved – 52,600 hospital admissions avoided and 22 million Covid-19 infections prevented by coronavirus vaccines – the majority of these delivered by GPs, alongside their routine surgeries. Since April 2021, all pregnant women have been offered the vaccine in the same way as the rest of the population, as no specific safety concerns related to expectant mothers having the jab have been found.

Pregnant women have the flu and whooping cough vaccines safely every year – often without a second thought. In pregnancy, there is very little safety data for any medications and for something as new as the Covid-19 vaccine, there is clearly no long-term data available.

The science of vaccines has been understood for some time, however, and there’s no scientific reason it will affect the mother and baby and no evidence it can affect fertility or cause miscarriage. What made the decision for me was the fact that documented side effects from vaccines are so rare, but there is an abundance of evidence that being infected with Covid during pregnancy is much more dangerous.

The risk of blood clots with the AstraZeneca vaccine was well publicised, but this risk is more than ten times higher if you catch Covid-19. For me, the risk of either ending up on an intensive-care unit while pregnant, having a premature birth, or worse, a stillbirth, or having a debilitating condition like long Covid as a new mum clearly outweighed the minimal risks of having a new vaccine.

As another long winter approaches, and the impacts of the pandemic make it harder to access care, pregnant women are a vulnerable group who need to be prioritised for vaccination.

Campaign group Pregnant then Screwed showed high rates of vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women this summer, due to mixed messages and misinformation on social media. Discussions around vaccination can be heated and although the jab is recommended to prevent against the known risks of this disease, it is an individual decision. The resources below can help you with your decision, or you can speak to a trusted source such as your GP – this would be perfect for a telephone consultation.

I’m grateful I was able to get protected so early in the vaccine roll-out due to being a healthcare worker. The fact that it is now widely available to all pregnant women shows that it works. Colleagues working in intensive care are reporting Covid deaths among younger, unvaccinated people. This is a tragedy. Choosing to get vaccinated is not an easy decision, but it is the right one.

I urge you to weigh up the evidence and choose to protect yourself if you are pregnant this winter – not only against influenza and whooping cough, but please, please roll up your sleeve for the coronavirus jab too.

Ellen Welch is a GP and Editorial Lead with the Doctors’ Association UK and is donating the fee for this piece to Pregnant then Screwed.

Useful resources:

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 

How the Covid vaccine works, NHS

Read the original piece here

Last Friday, 825 patients out of 3,480 patients who were in intensive care beds in England had COVID.

It’s a stark warning. The latest figures show the majority of admissions – 75 per cent – are unvaccinated.

I signed up to the NHS to serve the public – and the strain on the health service’s workforce and the public are huge. For every unvaccinated person with Covid in intensive care there’s someone else who may well be struggling to get access to a life-saving bed.

Recently, I had to plead to get a young man whose health had deteriorated back into the Intensive Therapy Unit. I knew at the time I asked there were no beds – literally there was ‘no room at the inn’. I had to go to ITU to look at one of my most trusted colleagues in the eye to beg and plead my patient’s case.

We all loathe those conversations. It may mean another ventilated patient being moved to another hospital miles away, or, as has happened previously, closing an entire operating theatre to ventilate a patient. That in itself means another patient could be delayed life-saving surgery.

These kinds of decisions are being made every day. The stresses on all concerned, staff, patients and families are excruciating. That day, my patient was lucky and a bed was found. But will we be tomorrow?

This has been this way for months. It’s depressing as the vaccines have saved literally thousands of lives, yet some still won’t see sense and take it. Even now as scientists champion the new, life-saving booster program, there are still those who refuse to even get a single dose.  

As a society, the only aspect we seem to have become fully immune to is the discussion of the data. More than 1000 people continue to die of Covid every week. If two big jumbo jets crashed every seven days, would there be significantly more national outrage?

Although more than 46 million of us –  80 per cent – have had both doses, that still means many millions have still not had a first jab in the UK. It’s likely you may know someone who’s either not vaccinated or has hesitated to get the jab.

The German health minister, Jen Spahn, said last week that by the end of this winter pretty much ‘everyone will have been vaccinated, cured or dead’, which was spot on.

Although there are entirely understandable anxieties around Omicron regarding it’s transmissibility and the potential for ‘vaccine escape’, the biggest risk is that we dither and delay.

At the Doctors’ Association we welcome the planned expansion of the Covid vaccination booster programme, although we share the concerns of many regarding delivering vaccinations to 13 million more people is a huge challenge with a limited workforce.

What is really depressing is how the success of the vaccination programme and the knowledge that wearing a mask helps protect gets twisted by conspiracy theorists and even some politicians. This, of course, increases hesitancy. This week the former government minister, Desmond Swayne told right-wing Talk Radio that ‘I’m exempt from wearing a mask due to my genetic predisposition to liberty’. It’s this kind of ignorance and arrogance that is so unhelpful. 

And while vaccination does reduce the risk of serious illness – it does not remove it completely, which perhaps explains such tragedies as Irfan Halim, the 45-year-old surgeon from Swindon who died of Covid despite having been double-jabbed some six months earlier. He was only days away from being offered a booster vaccine.

The vaccines have been amazing, but, like a seatbelt or obeying the speed limit, they aren’t perfect. Wearing a seatbelt and keeping to the speed limit does not remove your risk of dying in a car crash – but they both hugely help your likelihood of survival. 

So ignore the idiots, mask up and get jabbed today. 

Dr David Nicholl is a consultant neurologist based in Birmingham and a committee member of the Doctors’ Association UK which has a #MaskUp campaign

Read the full piece here

Listen to the full interview here.

Dr Kaveri Jalundhwala, co-chair of DAUK, urges youths to get a jab saying Covid patients are ‘getting younger and younger’, as well as highlighting the risk of long Covid, having experienced the condition herself.

Increasing numbers of young people with coronavirus are being admitted to hospital – including to intensive care wards – doctors have said, begging them not to “suffer unnecessarily” and to get the vaccine.

During the first weekend after the majority of Covid restrictions were lifted in England there were pictures of crowded nightclubs, filled with revellers not wearing masks or social distancing. Medics raised the alarm that unvaccinated young people urgently needed to protect themselves against infection to avoid serious illness.

The warning came as scientists gave a cautious welcome to the fifth day in a row of falling Covid case rates – the first time that cases have seen a sustained fall without a national lockdown. These figures, however, do not include the impact of 19 July’s easing of restrictions.

The UK recorded 29,173 new cases on Sunday, down from 48,161 the week before. But NHS England said one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds had still not had at least one dose of the vaccine – a figure that falls to one in 10 for the whole adult population.

While young people are generally at a much lower risk of dying from Covid, doctors say they are increasingly witnessing them become severely unwell. Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden, senior intensive care registrar, said the patients they were seeing were “getting younger and younger”.

“The vast majority of those requiring intensive care are unvaccinated: some of them will die. It is heartbreaking for us as NHS staff to watch people suffer unnecessarily knowing that this almost certainly could have been prevented by the vaccine,” she said.

“We are seeing patients in their 30s, or even in their 20s, who are fit and have no other medical problems on ICUs [intensive care units]. As an ICU doctor I am begging you to have the vaccine. Please don’t let not having the jab become the biggest mistake of your life.”

Prof Adam Finn, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation and from the University of Bristol, said there had been close to 200 admissions, with a mean age of 40, in the city during the Delta variant wave.

Speaking on LBC on Sunday, he said: “We have had people under 30 on our intensive care unit and also requiring high-level oxygen therapy. This is not always trivial in young adults. There are younger people really getting seriously ill at the moment, so that’s one good reason to think about having the vaccine.

“But the other one is, these vaccines now – it’s clear – do reduce the risk of not only getting the infection but passing it on to other people.”

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows that coronavirus in England is now largely an infection among young adults, with cases in 16- to 24-year-olds almost six times more common than in 50- to 69-year-olds.

Many experts had urged the government to postpone the easing of restrictions to allow more adults to get both Covid doses. On Friday, Prof Robert West, a health psychologist at University College London and scientific adviser to the government, accused ministers of allowing infections to rip through the younger population in an effort to bolster levels of immunity before the NHS faces winter pressures.

Dr Adrian Boyle, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said it was critical young people got vaccinated. He said that while young people getting ill with coronavirus was rare, “suddenly there’s quite a lot of them just because there’s so much Covid around”.

Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, said members were reporting “a much higher proportion of younger patients, under 40”.

Cordery also warned of the risk of long Covid. Government data published last month suggested more than 2 million adults in England have experienced coronavirus symptoms lasting more than 12 weeks, although the risk was found to rise with age. “It is important that everyone – whatever their age – understands the risks of remaining unvaccinated,” she said.

Dr Kaveri Jalundhwala, co-chair of Doctors’ Association UK, a campaigning and lobbying group, also highlighted the risk of long Covid, having experienced the condition herself. “Even if only 5% of people are getting long Covid, that’s going to be a huge number of people having a very debilitating condition that might last for a year or longer,” she said.

“It’s more debilitating than people realise. People can’t do their normal jobs any more, they can’t do normal activities, people struggle to walk or do any kind of exercise. We absolutely recommend everybody to get both vaccines as soon as possible, especially with the Delta variant just everywhere at the moment.”

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, described levels of infection among young people as alarming, saying: “Ministers must do more to promote vaccination, ensure young people have time off to get jabbed and open more pop-up vaccination clinics targeted at young people.”

The impact of Covid, and particularly the Delta variant, on young people is also of increasing concern in other countries. In the Netherlands, curbs on bars, restaurants and nightclubs were reimposed after new cases rose sevenfold.

In Australia, the Nobel prize-winning immunologist, Peter Doherty, said on Sunday: “Young people are at considerable risk and at higher risk than with the earlier variants of Covid. Young people shouldn’t think they’re at no risk or even minimal risks. Because it’s going to kill.”

The government’s proposed introduction of vaccine passports has caused significant backlash among Conservative MPs and it is unclear whether the government will be able to assemble a majority behind it.

Ministers are currently considering whether to make them mandatory for Premier League football matches and other events with more than 20,0000 attenders, having already announced their introduction for nightclub entry and “other venues where large crowds gather”.

Finn suggested the move could backfire and a more gentle approach was needed.

“If people begin to feel they are being kind of forced against their will to do something, then in a sense that’s quite a damaging thing to do because it gives people the impression [that] vaccination is something being imposed on them from outside,” he said.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said:“We have one of the highest Covid-19 vaccine uptake rates in the world. The latest ONS (Office for National Statistics) data shows 90% of adults under 30 have said they would come forward for a vaccine and three in five adults aged 18-24 have already received one dose in England.

“We have worked closely with the NHS to provide information at every opportunity on how to get a vaccine and its benefits – including partnerships with high-profile celebrities, social media platforms, and dating apps to encourage uptake among younger age groups.

“We are continuing to do everything we can to boost uptake for younger people and urge all those who have yet to book their appointment to do so as quickly as possible to help protect themselves and their loved ones.”

Read the full article here.

Dr Ayan Basu and Dr Ellen Welch, from DAUK, along with other doctors and health experts debunk some of the most common misconceptions about the Covid vaccines.

Read the full article here.

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NHS staff who argue the vaccine rollout has nothing to do with the lifting of lockdown restrictions “need to go on another educational course”, the Chair of the Doctors’ Association has told LBC.

Dr Jenny Vaughan made the remark to LBC’s Shelagh Fogarty after the subject of anti-lockdown protesters gathering in central London this weekend came up during their exchange.

Shelagh said: “There were some people in that rally claiming to be NHS workers [and] nurses too afraid to speak up about fears about vaccines.

She then Dr Vaughan: “What do you say to any NHS colleagues who share those views [and] who go on those marches?”

Dr Vaughan told Shelagh: “The truth is that the reason that we have been able to cautiously emerge from lockdown is that the vaccine has predominantly been delivered to over 80s and is now coming down all the other age groups and that we haven’t got the pressure on the NHS beds that we had.

“If anyone is strongly trying to argue that that’s nothing to do with the [vaccine] and they are an NHS staff [member] then they need to go on another educational course. They really do.

“The vaccine has delivered. But, in addition to that, so have people observing the lockdown.

“And that’s why we must continue to be very cautious with easing the lockdown. We absolutely must observe the social distancing and all the rules.”