Vaccine success is only way back to normality

Joe Thompson, Hipperholme

IT’S now been several weeks since our family heard the news we’d been longing to hear since Covid-19 first began to affect our lives - my Nan had been vaccinated!

She’s 77, with ongoing health issues, living on her own, and finally it was a glimmer of hope that things could return back to the way they were. But as time has slipped by, that hope has slowly turned into doubt.

The vaccine rollout has more or less been celebrated as a success. We look set to have given over 15 million of our most vulnerable their first dose by the middle of February, and in percentage terms we’re the fourth highest country in terms of doses provided.

We approved vaccines quickly, and immediately got on with the job of giving them to those most at risk. Yet that nagging doubt still lingers.

We will have all seen the news that the Government decided to delay the second dose of the vaccine from the recommended three-four weeks until 12 weeks.

This was also partnered with the quiet decision to allow ‘mix and match’ vaccinations where if a second dose of your original vaccine isn’t available, you’ll be given an alternative despite no scientific consensus that this will work.

Now we’ve seen some indication that new mutations may be more vaccine resistant. So, alarm bells are really ringing. My Nan is way past the original recommended four weeks, yet she’s had no contact whatsoever to indicate when, or in fact if, she’ll be getting a second dose of the vaccine.

You can look at any long and detailed article about how protective the vaccinations are after just one dose, but the short answer is that if only one dose is given, the vaccine is far less effective.

In no uncertain terms, if my nan gets this disease, she will die. As a family we have been excruciatingly careful throughout the entire pandemic, probably to the detriment of our own physical and mental wellbeing.

But we’ve done this because we have to. We have to do what we can to ensure that, one day, we can get things back to normal.

But normal will only happen if the vaccine rollout is a success. Of the around 11 million people who’ve received a first vaccine dose, only just over 500,000 people have received a second dose. So how many people are really protected?

I want to hug my nan, see my friends, go back to football, and start to get back the things I’ve missed so dearly. But it’s

‘As a family we have been excuciatingly careful throughout the entire pandemic... but we’ve done this because we have to’

JOE THOMPSON

now over to this government to deliver that. I hope, so desperately, that they can.