Tips on rolling out the covid-19 vaccine with Mark Porter, Andrew Pollard and Julia Marcus

Thanks to an incredible scientific effort, vaccines for COVID-19 have arrived in the UK and GPs, and other primary care health professionals, are now being faced with the monumental challenge of vaccinating high volumes of patients in a matter of days, whilst maintaining a COVID-safe environment, and fielding the myriad questions and concerns patients may have around the vaccine. In this week’s episode, we talk about the practical difficulties in preparing and administering the vaccine. We discuss the rationale behind extending the interval between the first and second doses, and the controversy it has caused. How do we assuage these worries, and how do we temper patients’ expectations regarding immunity, and the speed at which life may go back to normal? Finally, we talk about some lessons we can learn from HIV prevention to ensure equitable covid vaccination. Our guests: Mark Porter MBE is a GP in South Gloucestershire, and an award-winning journalist. He anchors the series ‘Inside Health’ on BBC Radio 4, he is the medical correspondent for The Times, and a columnist for Saga Magazine. Andrew Pollard is a professor of Paediatric Infection and Immunity at the University of Oxford, an honorary consultant paediatrician at Oxford Children’s Hospital, and the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group.

Julia Marcus is an infectious disease epidemiologist and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine . She is also an HIV researcher.