The School's role in vaccine development
and testing is very wide, so it starts
from really basic science coming up with
potential vaccine candidates and
looking at the immunology, right the way
through to doing large-scale field trial
and then looking at the policy
implications and the mathematical modelling,
so the School's interest in vaccines goes
right across the board.
My main research area is on the spread of
infectious diseases. So what we look at is
how diseases spread through communities
and then how best to control them.
And one of the best ways we have for
controlling infectious diseases is vaccines.
There are groups that are
hesitant about vaccinations, and a few
- and it's really quite rare - who refuse vaccination.
Mostly failure to vaccinate
individuals isn't about people refusing
it, or being hesitant. It's mostly difficulties
in reaching communities and us failing
to reach out and make it easy
for people to be vaccinated.
I am a Rabbi, and a school Principal and I'm Chairman of the
of Charidi Health Forum in London.
We work closely with the health authorities, the
GPs and health professionals and the
hospitals to improve services to the
Charidi community. We deal with many
issues. One of the
most challenging, is the issue of immunisation.
There are some challenges
to do with large families with young children.
General Practioners do not
have the correct facilities. When I mean
correct facilities, one that would accommodate
a number of children, with place to accommodate a buggy.
These are practical reasons, and they can be
overcome. In terms of programs to address
immunisation, Hackney and GP
Confederation have come up with a scheme
where they going to spend 220,000 pounds for
two years to lead to address those
issues and are even thinking about
mobile units going to visit
parents at home. There's a very serious
commitment both from the authorities
and from the community, and confident
that we will get there.
It is, without a shadow of a doubt that vaccines are
one of the most important public health tools we've got.
On the introduction of any vaccines
there is considerable uncertainty.
We usually have a very good idea about its safety
profile and we have a fairly good idea
about its effectiveness of protecting
individuals. What we don't know, is how
that will then pan out at a population
level, because if we protect some
individuals then it has a knock-on
effect on others, because by
protecting some individuals, you also
prevent them infecting other individuals.
So we use mathematical models. That's the
sort of work that I do. We use mathematical
models to try to predict it and
predict the effect it will have on
populations and how this pans out over time.
Me and my team are involved with the
successful Ebola trial and we were
involved in both the design and the
analysis that trial.
There was a vaccine trial, Phase three vaccines trial,
which is a pivotal vaccine.
This that the vaccine actually works,
and a number of these were tried in the Ebola crisis.
And I was involved in one of these trials
(in fact two of the trials) but one of
them we designed it specifically,
and that's the one, the only one of the
4-5 trials that were successful.
So we now have an Ebola vaccine.
We also introduced flu vaccination in children. Now that's a
big change. We used to vaccinate the
elderly and "at risk" group. I made all
the work analysis of all of that.
We've done a lot of work my team and myself
in conjunction with PHE, on HPV and HPV vaccination.
We introduced the vaccine in school girls in
2008. Heterosexual men are protected via
their sexual partners who are protected.
So by protecting the females, then
you also protect the males. There is another
group, of course, who are not protected
and that's gay men. A couple of years ago we
introduced vaccinations for gay men.
It may be that some gay men are not being affected.
We vaccinated and we have to look
into that and see how well coverage is
being achieved. An alternative way to
protect gay men is to protect everybody
by vaccinating boys. We would be
doubling the cost of the program by
doing that, and you know are the benefits
worth it? Given that we are already
trying to reach out and vaccinate gay men.
It's a balance. Challenges in terms of
the big diseases that
we don't have a vaccine for. I think
some of these outbreaks prone diseases,
which are often rare, evaluating those I
think that's a major challenge.
I think looking at the use of vaccines in
emergency situations like in war and
earthquake and those sort of things,
I think we could probably do a lot more,
protecting what are frankly some of the most
vulnerable people in the world.
There will always been ongoing challenges in order
to convince people to keep vaccinating,
particularly against diseases that are
now very rare, because we've been
vaccinated. That becomes a
challenge for public health systems.
Because if you stop vaccinating, the
disease will come back.
Keeping convincing people about the value of
vaccines will always be a challenge.