15 Million and Counting: The UK Vaccine Machine

As an employer of dozens of site staff, I have always taken my responsibilities seriously.

I’ve always enjoyed the softer, nurturing side of running a business. But like most company heads, I had not imagined the level of care needed over the last 11 months since the COVID-19 pandemic was announced.

What has helped enormously is the online learning we have put our staff through. As much as I try to visit every site regularly, it’s been more difficult of late for obvious reasons. So bite-sized health and safety e-learning – from lone working and manual handling, to fire safety and working at height – has been vital in ensuring as far as possible that our staff have been working safely and considering others’ safety (residents, visitors) more than ever before.

The latest e-learning course that our staff have taken is vaccine awareness. I took it too. It was educational and would give you great material for a well-informed chat in the pub, if they were open.

I thought I would share some vaccines facts and some opinions too. ‘Pourquoi pas?’, as they say back home.

Vaccine stats

As I’m writing this, Valentine’s Day 2021, 15 million people have been vaccinated across the UK. Undoubtedly an incredible feat and nearly world leading in terms of proportion of the population jabbed. That encouraging figure (which means 1 in 4 of the UK’s adults are on their way to full protection) is always going to be in the shadow of the 117,000+ who have tragically died within 28 days of a positive test. Comparing our COVID-19 record against other European countries suggest that the UK was simply not up to the task of beating the virus without vaccines.

The vaccine awareness e-learning course starts off by explaining that vaccines help our bodies develop immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19 without us having to get the illness. We all know that. Well, perhaps not everyone. What most people do not necessarily know is that different vaccines work in different ways – although with all types of vaccines, our bodies are left with a supply of antibodies with a memory of how to fight the virus.

Today, there are two coronavirus vaccines in use, and they work in two different ways. This was news to me and might be news to you.

Vaccines in use in the UK

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is an mRNA vaccine. This vaccine contains material from the virus that causes COVID-19 and it’s this material that gives our cells instructions how to make a harmless protein (a “spike protein”) that is unique to the virus. Our cells make copies of the protein, then they destroy the genetic material from the vaccine. Our bodies recognise that the protein should not be there and build two types of defensive white blood cells that will remember how to right the virus if we’re in infected in the future.

The Oxford Uni AstraZeneca vaccine is what is known as a viral vector vaccine. It contains a weakened version of a live virus, a common cold virus in fact. It does contain genetic material from the virus that causes COVID-19, and once this ‘viral vector’ is inside our cells, the genetic material gives cells instructions to make a protein that is unique to the virus that causes COVID-19. Using these instructions, our cells make copies of the protein which them prompts our bodies to make the same white blood cells that will remember how to fight the virus if called upon.

In the UK, you won’t get a choice as to which you get. You might even receive the Moderna or Novavax vaccines when they arrive. So far, there is no indication that one vaccine is necessarily ‘better’ than the other, although some countries are favouring the Pfizer vaccine for their elderly populations if their governments have the choice.

Comforting news

As an employer and father, I will breathe more easily when I know my family and colleagues are vaccinated. I am concerned about the variants which appeared to have originated from Kent, South Africa and Brazil, and whilst these and other future variants may evade some vaccines, we should all keep reading the news and educating ourselves as to what the government tells us and what we can learn from other UK news sources and other countries – all whilst avoiding fake or misleading news. Not necessarily easy.

As things stand, the UK is speeding through its first doses of the vaccine and some have received both jabs, offering them – hopefully – full protection. The Department of Health has recently announced that those in the 50-54 age group should be receiving the vaccine from late February. I am surprised but comforted by that news. I am further comforted by news from further afield, such as Israel which at the time of writing has vaccinated (Pfizer) over 72% of its population, and new infections there are plummeting as a result. There is no reason to believe that they won’t happen here too.

Life may never be the same again and the chances are, we will be living with COVID-19 for a long, long time. But vaccines make all the difference. The government reassures us that sufficient doses have been ordered – 100 million of the Oxford vaccine, 40 million Pfizer, and over 200 million of other coronavirus fighting vaccines including Moderna (approved in the UK) and Novavax (close to gaining UK approval). We may have been behind in our preparation for the worst when the pandemic was announced, however the UK is leading the way on the vaccination front.

— Nick Regnier