Hull’s mass vaccinations 60 years apart show we can overcome anything

MANY thanks to all the staff and volunteers at the Haxby Group Practice for their continued brilliant efforts in the Covid-19 vaccination programme. I was in and out of the Kingswood Health Centre in half an hour without any problems.

Like many of my fellow citizens, our minds may have gone back to a day nearly 60 years ago in mid-october 1961 when we were part of the last mass vaccination carried out in Hull. I refer to the Poliovirus Type I outbreak in September 1961 of mostly pre-school children.

Hull City Council responded quickly by asking and receiving permission from the Ministry of Health of the then Conservative government to use the Sabin vaccine for the mass vaccination of Hull and the surrounding towns.

I was a sixth-former at Kingston High School that October and remember standing in line (not socially distanced!) on the school stage to have the sugar lump soaked with two drops of the vaccine. Within weeks, more than 350,000 people were vaccinated and the outbreak brought under control.

These two events nearly 60 years apart are significant to me as on leaving school in 1962 I studied medical laboratory sciences and became Hull’s second qualified medical virologist. Within five years of my polio vaccination I was growing the virus in tissue cultures, having joined the late Jack Teal, to establish the region’s first Virology Laboratory at Castle Hill Hospital.

Under the direction of the enthusiastic Dr Gordon Alexander, the consultant microbiologist, we started out in a wooden hut with primitive equipment and within ten years had moved across to the purpose-built, fitted and equipped new virus laboratory that still stands at entrance 2.

From 1961 to 2021, this region’s National Health Service has been in the forefront of fighting against viral diseases of old and the new ones that have sprung up, such as HIV, hepatitis A,B,C, chlamydia, norovirus and now Covid-19.

The work continued under the guidance of Dr Rolf Meigh and then the last decade a new generation of virologists. This small but dedicated team were the first in the UK to handle Covid-19 at the very beginning of the epidemic and have, like the rest of our health service, been working round the clock every day since. We owe them all a massive thank you for their efforts.

The golden rule a virologist learns from day one is that prevention is better than cure. Vaccination enables many viral diseases to be controlled, although only if the majority of people support these programmes.

Covid-19 has shown how vulnerable we still are, but also how we can overcome whatever nature throws at us if we all pull together. David Talbot,

retired chief virologist, Hull.