Vaccine could be a ‘patch in the post’ next winter

“PATCHES in the post” could be used to immunise the public next winter, the head of the vaccination task force has suggested.

Kate Bingham t old t he public accounts committee yesterday that the vaccine needed to be made “as simply as an annual flu jab” in order to make it as effective as it can be.

She said: “We need to be developing vaccine formats that are ideally oral … intra-nasal, or a patch that you could just get sent in the post and that will protect you for whatever period it may be.”

Ms Bingham told the committee that there were “clearly things we can do to act more quickly next time and make this much more routine as part of surveillance and production of vaccines”.

She added that the task force was thinking about how the Government can “i mprove the manufacturing, improve the scale up and fundamentally how can we improve the actual vaccine format”.

She said the patch-in-the-post style vaccine would allow for vaccines to be “given repeatedly”, rather than the current method, which requires “needles” and “two doses”.