A Liverpool doctor shared a message of vaccine importance to combat coronavirus.
Dr Simon Bowers, GP at Fulwood Green Medical Surgery in Aigburth, shared a message on Twitter this week to say his family and all of his team at his practice are fully vaccinated as he said it is "the right thing to do."
This week, the ECHO reported how Liverpool's vaccination level is lagging behind the national average, with figures showing more than 140,000 people have yet to receive a vaccine in the city.
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Leading medics said vaccine hesitancy is an issue in cities up and down the country.
Liverpool City Council said it recognises hesitancy is an issue, citing individual confidence and misinformation among reasons why a significant number of people in the city have not yet come forward for their vaccines.
A council spokesperson said: "Liverpool’s current figures place us somewhere in the middle of the range, when compared to other core cities, and therefore is not statistically significantly different from where you would expect our uptake to be.
"However, clearly we would want uptake to be as high as possible, to reduce the numbers of people who fall seriously ill as a result of getting covid.
"There isn’t a single reason why people aren’t coming forward to get vaccinated, and is likely to be a combination of accessibility to the vaccine, individual confidence and demand for the vaccine, and misinformation – but we are working with partners across the city to address this, including a new project with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
"Vaccination is proven to work, and therefore we would encourage anyone who hasn’t yet taken up their offer to get vaccinated."
Dr Bowers said he understood the discussion around vaccinations last year.
He told the ECHO : "The conversation we had as a country last year around vaccines was really interesting and in many ways entirely appropriate.
"I totally understood anybody's concerns that this vaccine had just seemingly arrived as if by magic when it normally takes a medicine five or six years to work its way through all the testing, research, governance and ethics.
"And so I could understand people's concerns about the safety about it.
"Where I think we are now is there's millions of people vaccinated across the country and we now know more about these agents than what we do about the drugs we have prescribed for years because of the number of people who have had it.
"We very quickly moved into a narrative where you were either pro or anti-vaccine, you weren't allowed to be just concerned and want some more information.
"Therefore the information became a bit toxic.
"For example one response to my tweet and I think the exact words were 'anybody who has to rely on the opinion of experts, does not have a brain to think for themselves.'
"When you think of the turn of that, that's how far we have come since Brexit and things.
"And now we have a situation now where people are challenging local experts on social media.
"If we try and stick to the facts and talk about patients we know that this vaccine, massively, massively, massively reduces the potential that you would die of covid.
"I think that is a huge positive.
"It is an incredibly effective medical intervention, but in terms of how our NHS copes and more importantly at the minute even the great numbers around mortality, is the fact it also massively reduces the potential of ending up in hospital."
The Liverpool doctor revealed that, when the vaccine was first introduced, his staff were the first people he had to talk to about concerns.
However, after discussing with them about how the vaccine works, all of Dr Bowers staff consented to the covid jab.
Speaking to the ECHO he said: "One of the first groups of public that we had to talk to was our own staff.
"So very quickly, our clinicians, our doctors, our nurses looked at the evidence, read about how the vaccine was made and reflected what they knew about it from their clinical training and we didn't have any clinicians who were concerned.
"They were quite happy that this was going to be a safe vaccine.
"But what we had from our wonderful admin teams was a lot of anxiety and don't forget it's often a different demographic, a lot more younger people working in admin teams.
"There was quite a lot of stuff on the internet such as the vaccine might affect your fertility.
"I was sat a the dinner table at home and my boys started asking me questions about the vaccine, so I was trying to explain in kind of school boy and girl level biology what a vaccine does.
"And that's when me and my colleagues decided if we could do something like that for the staff.
"So then we had a session in the afternoon where all the staff came and we made sure at no stage that any question was a bad question.
"They could ask us anything about it they wanted and we did a little presentation with it on exactly how the vaccine introduces this little protein spike into your body, so your immune system can recognise the virus and it is then your immune system that then takes the virus on and gets the positive effect of the vaccine - no matter what vaccine you get.
"The Pfizer vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine do it in a slightly different way but the result is the same.
"And most importantly the thing that reassured my staff more than anything, was that this is exactly how we develop the vaccine that we pump into tiny babies and so this is no different.
"Then when they ask the question - how did we create it so quickly - we were able to show that normally you have one drug company trying to build something and keep it secret, so it has only got a few people and a few scientists who can work on it.
"Whereas suddenly you have a research budget of the developed world across the entire planet earth which was spent on combating one virus.
"So when all of this is over, this story of how the vaccine was developed as a human race so quickly is a wonderful story of victory and hard work, but also what you should do when you spend money.
"We got to a situation quite quickly where all of our staff consented to the vaccine, so I then with my patients used the exact same model."
Dr Bowers said he believes there is hesitancy in Liverpool about the vaccine due to various reasons and said people should start listening to "local experts."
He said: "There is still 140,000 people in Liverpool who have not had the vaccine.
"That is a quarter of us eligible to have the over 12s vaccine. That is 140,000 people walking past in Tesco's or in the park who have not been vaccinated at all.
"There are loads of reasons why that is, but I think the greatest reason is we are a savvy population and the people telling us to get vaccinated is the current government and we know about this city's relationship with a Tory government.
"I think if people can start listening to local, and I am going to use experts because I am not ashamed to use the word expert as I have a degree in medicine and I was taught to understand this kind of stuff.
"And we have an unbelievably good director of public health in Matt Ashton whose social media output, content in the Echo and stuff on the radio is always well balanced."
Dr Bowers said the fact remains the vaccines are safe and effective.
He added: "The fact remains, and this isn't the matter of opinion anymore, because of the number of patients, but the vaccines are safe and they are effective.
"I am as comfortable with that as I am giving a child Calpol or recommending a course of chemotherapy for a patient with cancer.
"It is my duty as an NHS doctor to only tell my patients what I know to be evidently true."
