Vaccination programmes are among the most effective ways to improve health. They are also one of the least expensive ways of making sure that people stay healthy. In the UK we have one of the best vaccination programmes in the world.

As the vaccine programme began 60 years ago, it is now considered routine to get vaccinated. Vaccines do not just protect the person getting the jab, they also protect the whole population because they stop the spread of infections. To eliminate infections in the population it is essential that most people do indeed get vaccinated.

Over the last 10 years, and particularly during the Covid pandemic, the proportion of people who have been vaccinated across all vaccines (“the vaccine coverage”) has declined. As the vaccine-preventable infections are no longer being spread in society, parents are less worried about getting their children vaccinated. Anti-vaxxers communicating on social media may reduce coverage but the practical difficulties of getting a vaccination appointment may be a critical factor reducing vaccine coverage. The likelihood of receiving vaccines is influenced by how much income you have, where you live and what ethnic group you belong to and this is deeply unfair. COVID-19 vaccines were tremendously successful during the pandemic but it took two years to vaccinate everyone. A big challenge to health services in the UK is to be better prepared for a pandemic in future.

We propose to support UKHSA to improve vaccine coverage, to make vaccines more accessible in society and to prepare for a future pandemic by assembling a research team from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Cambridge University and University College London. The team contains scientists with different skills including epidemiologists, data analysts, economists, social scientists, laboratory immunologists and mathematicians. Our mathematicians play a crucial role in understanding the spread of infections and the protection that vaccines can provide and they have advised the NHS on how to introduce many different vaccines in the past. Our team will focus on the causes of poor delivery of vaccines, and poor vaccine coverage across England. Working with health care workers, and members of the public, we will work out solutions for specific types of communities and test whether these solutions can increase vaccine coverage. The health service is using a lot more digital information (like the NHS App) and our data analysts will combine multiple sources of data to improve the scheduling and delivery of vaccines. We will also assist UKHSA to develop tools to use in the event of another pandemic; for example, we will analyse blood samples taken at clinics and hospitals to define how much immunity exists to rare viruses and we will set up systems for doing rapid vaccine trials using routine data from GPs and hospitals.

Our team believes that improving one element of the vaccine system will have positive impacts across the whole system. We are dedicated to improving coverage, making the vaccine system fairer, and preparing against the chance of a future pandemic.

In collaboration with London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, and University College London.