Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many children up to the age of four received the meningitis B vaccination in (a) Lancashire and (b) the UK in 2015.

The Meningitis B (MenB) immunisation for infants was introduced on 1 September 2015.

The vaccine is offered alongside other routine immunisations at two and four months of age, with a booster dose at 12-13 months. A limited one-off catch-up programme was also offered, targeting infants born in May and June 2015. Information on the number of children who received the meningitis B vaccination as part of National Health Service programme in 2015 is not yet available.

Coverage of vaccines offered in the routine childhood immunisation programme is usually evaluated at 12 months of age, however, in order to provide more timely information about the newly introduced MenB vaccine, a temporary sentinel surveillance programme was set up to extract monthly coverage data direct from general practice systems for children who had just reached six months of age in England. Preliminary vaccine coverage at six months of age for children born in May, June and July 2015 is available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vaccine-uptake.

It is anticipated that coverage for both doses of vaccine will increase when evaluated again when they are 12 months of age.