Respiratory Syncytial Virus: Immunisation Programme

Lord Watts Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. She makes a very good point, and I will feed that specific question back to the department. One thing that we were aware of was that certain communities were not as keen as others to take up the immunisation programme, and a lot of work has been done on that.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, are the Government sure they have got their timing right? It seems to me that the boosters have been given about a month behind, in the sense that both Covid and flu are raging before the Covid vaccination boosters are available.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I refer to the answer I gave just a moment ago: 7.7 million people have received their flu jabs since the start of the campaign on 11 September. I assure the noble Lord that NHS England has planned well ahead of this winter season, and I believe that we are making progress. But there may be cases where it could and should be done better.