Latest vaccination news

Vaccination is the most important thing we can do to protect ourselves and our children against ill health. They prevent millions of deaths worldwide every year.

Since vaccines were introduced in the UK, diseases like smallpox, polio and tetanus that used to kill or disable millions of people are either gone or are now very rarely seen.

Other diseases like measles and diphtheria have reduced to a very low number of cases each year since vaccines were introduced.

However, if people stop having vaccines, it’s possible for infectious diseases to quickly spread again. In other countries these diseases are still common and so overseas travel can import disease back into the UK.

Vaccines teach your immune system how to create antibodies that protect you from diseases.

It’s much safer for your immune system to learn this through vaccination than by catching the diseases and treating them.

Once your immune system knows how to fight a disease, it can usually mount an immune response very quickly which means that you can control the infection without becoming seriously unwell. Sometimes, your immune system remembers the vaccine so well that it can even give you life long protection from the disease.

To help you understand how vaccinations and the immune system work together to protect you and your family from harmful illnesses, Dr Virginia Ashman, clinical lead for the immunisation programme in LLR, has produced a video to explain the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klqcqLo9JAY

All vaccines are thoroughly tested to make sure they will not harm you or your child.

It often takes many years for a vaccine to make it through the trials and tests it needs to pass for approval.

Once a vaccine is being used in the UK it’s also monitored for any rare side effects by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It is also carefully monitored to make sure it still works.

Most of the side effects of vaccination are mild and do not last long. In fact, if you feel a little unwell after your vaccine it suggests your immune system is responding really well to your vaccination.

The most common side effects of vaccination include:

• the area where the needle goes in looking red, swollen and feeling a bit sore for 2 to 3 days
• feeling a bit unwell or developing a high temperature for 1 or 2 days
• older children and adults may feel faint
• feeling tired, having a headache, fever, or muscle aches and pains

Some children might also cry and be upset immediately after the injection. This is normal and they should feel better after a cuddle. Common side effects usually pass after a few days.

Most vaccines contain a small amount of bacteria, virus or toxin that’s been weakened or destroyed in a laboratory first.

Some contain just tiny fragments of the germ that make your body think it’s coming into contact with the bacteria, virus or toxin.

Some vaccines contain the genetic coding for a tiny fragment of the virus so that your cells can create their own copy and your immune system can familiarise itself up close.

This means there’s a very low risk of healthy people catching a disease from a vaccine. It’s also why you might see vaccines being called “live” or “non-live”.

Scientists are constantly monitoring to see which infectious diseases pose the greatest threat to us here in the UK. If a disease becomes a significant threat, then they will try to create a vaccine to prevent that disease (e.g., the Covid vaccine was developed during the pandemic in 2020). Scientists are not always successful at creating vaccines (e.g., there is still no vaccine against either Hepatitis C or HIV infection) and some vaccines wear off (wane) too quickly to be worthwhile. There are currently around 20 different diseases that we can protect ourselves against here in the UK; these are called vaccine preventable diseases.

Each vaccine is designed to protect against a specific infection, and, for each infection, we find that a different age group is at most risk; some vaccines are therefore given at the right time of life to protect people when they are most vulnerable.

Other vaccines work best at a certain age so we sometimes delay giving them until we know the immune system will be able to mount a strong response to the vaccine.

Some vaccines are designed to protect us against short-term seasonal threats; the flu vaccine is the best example of this where we must have a vaccine each year before the flu season starts and that vaccine is updated each year to try to protect against the strains of virus predicted to be circulating.

Sometimes vaccine immunity wanes (wears off) with time. This isn’t always a problem as sometimes we have grown older and are no longer at such high risk from the disease (e.g., Whooping cough vaccine is not necessary for adults but is essential for tiny babies and children). Other vaccines create immunity that usually lasts forever. An example of this effect is the MMR vaccine which gives lifelong protection against Measles but waning protection against Mumps – this is why it is still possible to catch Mumps as an adolescent despite having had the vaccine as a child; this doesn’t mean the entire vaccine has worn off and the Measles component is usually still working extremely well into older age.

In the UK we have a Vaccination Schedule which outlines which vaccines we should receive, at what time, for the best protection when we are most vulnerable.