This is a really tricky issue and likely to affect many rural dwellers and their families. The sort of treatment associated with blood cancer is challenging to access in rural settings and this worry about low levels of immunity is likely to raise the stress levels of those involved. It tells us:
England’s public health body has been accused of giving hundreds of thousands of cancer patients “misleading and dangerous” advice over the level of protection they can expect after receiving their Covid vaccine.
There were calls yesterday for Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, to intervene and correct a widely reported statement from Public Health England (PHE) stating that a double vaccination was “highly effective in clinical risk groups”.
In a furious letter, seen by the Observer, Blood Cancer UK’s chief executive, Gemma Peters, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the press statement, which covered the findings of a recent study into vaccine responses. She said that its “confident, definitive assertions” about the level of protection given to the UK’s 230,000 blood cancer patients could not yet be supported by the “wider body of evidence on vaccine efficacy in the immunocompromised”.