Plans to give flu jabs with covid vaccine boosters

Sunday 22 August 2021

Plans to give flu jabs at the same time as 'top-up' doses of the covid vaccine at Fort Regent this autumn are being drawn up, the Deputy Medical Officer for Health has revealed.

Dr Ivan Muscat MBE told the Health Scrutiny Panel on Thursday that delivering flu vaccines alongside covid boosters would be "really important this year because we didn’t have any flu infection last year".

“We will be blending the usual ways in which we can vaccinate against flu with the vaccinations against covid at the Fort, because covid is going to be given out of there as well so, rather than bringing in people twice we would give them both vaccines at the same time.”

Peter Bradley, the new Public Health Director, said he expected the booster programme would start on 30 September, following an announcement from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on 16, and that planning was underway to hit that deadline.

“There seems to be agreement in principle that a booster will be appropriate and beneficial this coming late summer, early autumn, for certain groups,” Dr Muscat explained.

Pictured: Dr Ivan Muscat, the Deputy Medical Officer for Health.

“What JCVI are still determining are the details around that - which groups will go first, what vaccine will be used - although there seems to be a preference to date for the MRNA vaccines, specifically Pfizer. But until they come out with the specific recommendations, we can’t define our programme.

“What we are doing, of course, is preparing ourselves to deliver the programme whatever the finer details are within that programme.”

Dr Muscat said he expected the programme to start with the most vulnerable islanders, as it would be “logical and in keeping with the time of our first programme”.

Booster vaccines will be administered from the Vaccination Centre at Fort Regent to ensure the cold chain for the Pfizer vaccine is maintained, the Panel heard.

While the percentage of the adult population vaccinated reached 80% last week, Dr Muscat said there was no plan to wind down the vaccination programme - which, it's estimated, will have cost £2.8 million by the end of the month - as the proportion of islanders protected from the virus is actually lower than that.

“The 80% of the eligible population means that only 64% of that group is actually protected because the efficacy of the vaccine is 80%, so 80% of 80% is 64%, which is actually a small proportion of our population relatively speaking,” he said.

“We would much rather, of course, achieve a higher proportion of the eligible group than we have to date, so we will continue to push out onwards.”

The World Health Organisation has previously pleaded for nations more advanced in their covid vaccination regimes to delay their booster programmes to ensure that poorer nations can catch up first. Its Director General said earlier this month that there should be a "moratorium on boosters until at least the end of September, to enable at least 10% of the population of every country to be vaccinated."

When asked about the timing of Jersey's booster programme in response to these comments, a Government spokesperson said: "Jersey gets its vaccines from the UK, so it would be up to the UK to decide how to prioritise its supply of vaccines."

Jersey's latest vaccination statistics show that, as of last Sunday (15 August), 81% of adult islanders were fully vaccinated against covid, while 25% of 16 and 17-year-olds had received their first dose since becoming eligible on 5 August.

Overall, 86% of adults in the island have had at least one dose, while 87% of islanders aged over the age of 30 are fully vaccinated. 35% of those in the 18 to 29 category are still yet to take up the offer of a vaccine.

In total, 75,506 first doses and 70,933 second doses have been administered since the programme launched in December.