Worried parents are contacting pharmacies in an “increasingly desperate” effort to get their children vaccinated against meningitis after the outbreak in Kent that has killed two young people and left 13 seriously ill.
The surge in demand has led to stocks of the vaccine running so low that many pharmacies cannot get hold of supplies from wholesalers.
Students living in halls of residence at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, are being offered the vaccine as health officials seek to curb the spread of what Wes Streeting, the health secretary, described as an “unprecedented” outbreak of the rare but sometimes deadly infection.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) sought to reassure the public that the outbreak – which has been closely linked to those attending the Club Chemistry nightclub in Canterbury on 5, 6 and 7 March – has not spread beyond Kent.
“We have no evidence of any wider spread,” Dr Gayatri Amirthalingam said. There was no risk to anyone outside Kent, she stressed.
The UKHSA is overseeing an intensive campaign of contact tracing to identify who the 15 confirmed casualties of the outbreak were in touch with.
It emerged on Tuesday that one of the 15 people was a University of Kent student who travelled to London, fell ill there and sought help at a hospital in the capital on Sunday or Monday.
The seriousness of the outbreak, which experts are calling a “super-spreader” event, meant the UKHSA had been treating the Kent outbreak as a national rather than local incident from when it began at the end of last week, sources said.
Almost nine out of 10 (87%) pharmacies that responded to a snap poll reported a dramatic rise in requests from concerned parents to get a child or children vaccinated, the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) said.
They were paying £200 or more per child for a vaccine that protects against meningitis B, the strain of meningococcal bacteria involved in the outbreak. For example, Boots is charging £220 for the two jabs needed.
One pharmacy owner in Berkshire said: “I have received about 30 or 40 calls in two hours from people wanting to book their entire families for vaccinations. They are worried. They are getting agitated.”
The NPA chair, Olivier Picard, said demand was “far exceeding supply”, forcing pharmacies to “manage constrained levels of supply” and tell anxious parents that they cannot immunise their children.
Demand for the vaccine was usually limited to a few patients per pharmacy every year and involved those travelling to countries which required it as a condition of entry. But “substantial numbers of patients [had been] trying to book due to the outbreak in Kent”, Picard said.
The MenB vaccine became available on the NHS in 2015 but is only given to babies. That means many schoolchildren and young adults are not vaccinated against what experts warn is a rare but serious infection that can kill quickly.
Raj Matharu, the chair of Community Pharmacy London, which represents hundreds of pharmacies across the capital, said: “People are becoming increasingly desperate to access the meningitis vaccine. Pharmacy teams across London advise that they are being inundated with calls, and many parents are now walking into pharmacies in the hope of getting vaccinated.
“Often they simply can’t get it through their GP. The triage process takes too long and parents are understandably anxious.
“But the reality is that pharmacies can’t get hold of the vaccine either. Our main suppliers are telling us it’s unavailable, leaving a real gap in the system at exactly the moment demand is rising.”
Some parents had been trying to obtain emergency supplies of antibiotics from GP surgeries and pharmacies. Four centres in Canterbury were offering antibiotics to anyone who may need them.
The outbreak has prompted calls for the NHS to give teenagers and young adults the MenB jab. A Meningitis Research Foundation spokesperson said: “We believe there should be better protection for teenagers and young adults, including improved access to a routine MenB vaccination. Cost should not be a barrier when we are talking about such a serious illness as meningitis, which can be deadly and leaves one in five survivors with lifelong disabilities.”
The National Union of Students said all students should be offered the vaccine, either by the health service or their universities.
Amira Campbell, the NUS president, said: “The meningitis vaccines should be offered on the NHS for young people. There should never be a cost barrier to life-saving vaccines. And until then, universities and colleges themselves should consider offering it to their students as no lives should be lost to a preventable illness.”
Dr Leyla Hannbeck, the chief executive of the Independent Pharmacies Association, called on the NHS to urgently commission pharmacies to vaccinate all teenagers and students born before 2015. “There is not a moment to be lost in protecting young people across the country,” she said.
Streeting told MPs in the Commons that he had asked the joint committee on vaccination and immunisation (JCVI), which advises ministers, to “re-examine eligibility for meningitis vaccines” for a wider range of people than those who currently qualify. The JCVI has already ruled out on grounds of cost effectiveness a catchup campaign for young people who did not get MenB before 2015.
However, experts said the two MenB vaccines used in the UK may not necessarily provide protection against the strain seen in Kent, that protection only lasts a few years, and that they can take days or weeks to offer protection.
Prof Adam Finn, an expert in paediatric vaccinations at the University of Bristol, said there was “some value” in vaccinating young people with the MenB jabs privately before they go to university. But he would “strongly advise” people against buying vaccines for young adult children at this point.
“First of all, the two vaccines that exist, the ones that are available in the UK, don’t cover all of Men B [strains]. And it’s not clear at this point whether the strain that’s causing this outbreak would actually be in any way usefully prevented by the Men B vaccine,” he said.
Finn also noted the protection afforded by vaccinations could take several weeks to materialise, by which time the current outbreak would be over.
“So there’s really nothing much to be gained. And the losses, aside from the costs and trouble, is that it will create a lot of chaos,” said Finn.
“If there is some value in providing vaccination, you can be sure that the public health authorities will do that. They’ll obtain the right vaccine and they’ll give it to the right people.”
Work is under way to try to identify how the bacteria was passed between those affected. Amid speculation that the sharing of vapes may have been a factor, experts warned e-cigarette users never to share theirs with anyone.
Streeting defended the UKHSA against criticism that it had moved too slowly in the early days of the outbreak. He was “confident” the agency had acted as “quickly and comprehensively as possible” after it was notified of the first case last Friday, he said.
