Vaccine booster achieved! At great expense, because my government
wants me dead. (Yeah, yeah, Americans, I know. They're trying to bring
your system here.)
Since I am not over 75, living in a care home, or with a
compromised immune system, I had to pay. (I can't help noticing that
one of those conditions is effectively an admission that care homes
are an adverse disease environment and nobody is going to do anything
about it.) Meanwhile the government destroyed many doses of vaccine it
had already bought, rather than risk safeguarding the health of the
rest of the population.
So off to Boots it was. Even here in the home counties, the closest
available sites were Windsor, Reading, and St Albans, none of which is
conveniently accessible from here by public transpot. (Well, you can
get a bus from the middle of High Wycombe to Reading, twice an hour
during the working day, taking an hour and a half each way if all goes
well.)
Being fair to Boots, they did offer evening appointments as well as
daytime ones. So people with jobs less understanding than mine are
still in with a chance.
The first appointment was cancelled at short notice because the
vaccine didn't show up, but everything went smoothly last Thursday.
Total side effects: a slightly sore injection site for a few days, and
I felt unable to settle to anything the evening after the jab—though
that's a thing that I sometimes experience anyway.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
04:20pm on
30 April 2024
I've also paid for a private covid vaccination at Boots, partly because I'm going on a cruise and that's a notorious environment for disease spread. In my case I was able to do a 25 minute bicycle ride to Petty Cury in Cambridge which suited me fine, and my employer didn't even want to know where I'd been (they're so relaxed post covid about such things that I fear someone is going to take unreasonable advantage and there will be a clamp down).
I didn't know the UK government had destroyed doses of vaccine, though I assume they were going to expire. It is cheaper to destroy them than administer them, and giving them to people this year sets an expectation for future years that the government may not want to set. I don't agree but one or both of those is likely to be the logic.
- Posted by Ashley R Pollard at
09:05am on
01 May 2024
So, how much did it cost? And, besides going to Boots was there any other than the outrageous cost to the process?
- Posted by Chris at
12:45pm on
01 May 2024
Like every other government which bought more doses of covid vaccines than could be used before their expiry dates, the UK government destroyed quite a large number (mostly AstraZeneca, which because of scare stories about it people were refusing to accept) at the end of 2021. I think it was 4.7 million doses, about 4% of the total we'd bought up and stockpiled. The original estimate of probable wastage was 20%, so 4% doesn't seem too appalling. About 4.5 million doses of AstraZeneca were also passed on under a WHO initiative to other countries which had not been able to afford them initially, as far as I remember: that was reported on the BBC World Service at the time. (How grateful they were probably depended on whether they had anti-vax nutters in large numbers among their population.)
Have large numbers of doses of vaccine been destroyed in this country since then? If so, had they reached their use-by date, as Owen suggests?
- Posted by RogerBW at
02:04pm on
01 May 2024
Ashley: £100 each. Apparently there is only one other company providing it at all, "PharmaDoctor", and they supply individual pharmacies. (Even Boots don't make it particularly obvious on their web site that this is a thing you can get from them.)
Owen and Chris: as I recall, they bought the doses when they were expecting the same policy as in previous years, then when they got the convenient policy advice (with about four months to go before expiry) simply sat on the surplus rather than donating it or allowing anyone else to buy it.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
03:17pm on
01 May 2024
When I asked at Boots I was told the reason it's hard to find on their web site and you can't pay online for it yet is this is a trial by Boots to see if there is demand for private covid vaccination. My vaccinator said they'd been surprised by the strong uptake. If it continues to be reasonably popular Boots will add it to their normal private vaccination web system.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
03:20pm on
01 May 2024
I should add, up to now I've had the Autumn covid booster on the NHS same as the flu jab due to an underlying condition. This private jab is my sixth in total.