NHS leaders and Doctors have warned it will be likely to experience delays in flu vaccine supplies this year if there is a no-deal Brexit. They have also said the EU departure date is in line with winter season which creates “a perfect storm for the NHS”.
Flu vaccines are offered free every year to those most at risk of the illness, including over-65s and pregnant women, and other people can pay a small fee for the jab.
A major flu vaccine manufacturer Sanofi said delays in deciding what strains of flu they will use in the vaccines will result in over a million doses will have to be imported after Britain leaves the EU. Vaccines are usually available for delivery by the end of August and throughout September.
Hugo Fry, the company’s managing director, said: “In the world of vaccines, you get shortages more often than you do in medicines, for example, because of the complexity. Therefore imagine in a world where it is difficult to get things into a country and there’s a shortage of a particular vaccine, that’s when you want to rush it into the country in case there’s a shortfall.
“Rushing things into a country in a period post no-deal Brexit might be a bit difficult, for example. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my crystal ball with me, but what we’re doing is planning for what we think will be the worst-case scenario.”
The government said it was “working closely with vaccine suppliers to ensure they have robust contingencies in place”.
“What we can see is we’re likely to not have enough flu vaccine, we are likely not to have the flu vaccine coverage that we’ve had in previous years, and that is likely to have an impact on the NHS,” Prof Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said.
The government said: “We want to reassure patients that our plans should ensure that supplies of vaccines remain uninterrupted when we leave the EU on 31 October, whatever the circumstances.”
Different strains of flu are used in vaccines each year. Normally they are decided in February however this year it is taking longer to identify which strains of flu virus were to be included. This means it has set a delay of the production and distribution of the vaccine. This also means that they can not be stockpiled in advance of a October no-deal Brexit.
