We should celebrate the vaccine rollout – but some of the most vulnerable are slipping through the cracks

Monday afternoon, I found myself in the peculiar position of being asked for comment by a member of the press. This happens so infrequently that my own honed, ultra-sensitive, journalistic instincts were piqued. Perhaps I had a story to tell.

Earlier in the day, I had tweeted my dismay at the situation faced by my 84 year-old mother who has not yet been vaccinated. It was like I had opened a vein as other people began to vent with their own experiences. Evidently, she was not alone.

My mother went into hospital last October with an undiagnosed/poorly diagnosed water infection. At the time, I wrote about the systemic incompetence around treating UTIs in older women. My mother emerged from the hospital three weeks later badly delirious and extremely dehydrated. We’ve been nursing her at home for four months now, her condition slowly improving with lots (and I mean lots) of sleep. Yet it has been a hellish sixteen weeks during which time I’ve struggled with sleeplessness, the financial worries of care, as well as doing things that no son should ever be asked to do for a parent.

Amid all this awfulness, the issue of the jab also began to weigh on my mind, but I was assured that, at 84, my mother would be in the second tier and would be one of the first to get the jab. Boris Johnson had promised back in January that the most vulnerable should get their vaccinations by mid-February. The government this week claimed (with some justification) success in that regard.

Yet as we now discover that Gary Glitter, Rosemary West, and (not equating them at all) Courtney Love (an American!) have all received the vaccine on the NHS, my mother and many others, who have neither harmed a person nor killed a song in their lives, remain jab free.

So, what is going on?

Well, it is certainly not for the want of trying. The NHS sent out a letter in January, urging us to hit the vaccination website and get an appointment booked ASAP. We did that immediately but nowhere on the website did it have a means to indicate “can’t travel” or “housebound”. It also assumed that we had transport, which we don’t, and they directed us to vaccination centres in Huddersfield or Runcorn, fifty and eighteen miles away. Admittedly, they could have directed us to the end of the street and it would have still been impossible.

About a week later, the local GP service rang to chide us for not arranging a vaccination. They directed us to St Helens Saint’s Rugby Ground (about 4 miles away but still inconveniently located). I explained my mother’s situation and they tutted their despair. “Well, we haven’t got the vaccine here in the surgery to send out with the nurses,” they said, “and even if we had, we don’t have refrigeration units”. They then said we would have to wait for stocks of the AstraZeneca vaccine since only the Pfizer one was being administered at the rugby ground. After the call, I was left feeling like I was expecting the impossible; that we were living in the Steppes of Outer Mongolia rather than the North West of England.

I waited another two weeks until I rang again. They still had no news, but they could assure me that my mother was “on the list”.

A week later, I rang again. Same story. My faith in “the list” was being tested.

The following week I spoke to the GP, who sounded genuinely shocked when I mentioned that my mother still hadn’t been vaccinated. He said he’d been led to believe that everybody who needed and wanted one had received one. He assured me he’d look into it and, sure enough, the next day a nurse called to assure me that my mother’s name was now on a different list which had been forwarded to “the CCG” (Clinical Commissioning Group).

Now, a week later, there is still no news, so I tweeted our local CCG to ask what was going on. They replied, in part: “All housebound patients should now have been vaccinated…”

Obviously, the interest the press is taking in stories such as this one suggests that my mother is hardly unique in the UK. My tweet was just one in thousands describing a situation The Guardian had reported at the beginning of February (“’They’ve been ignored’: older people cared for at home face vaccine delays”).

We’ve since been assured that my mother’s details have been passed on to the primary care team so… she’s on another list! Coincidentally, however, half an hour later, I was contacted by a member of the NHS Immunisation Management Service who wanted to know why my mother still hadn’t been vaccinated. I explained all the above. She sighed and confessed she also didn’t have a clue, offering: “Had you tried ringing the local hospital?”

Admittedly, it is easy to scoff at the failure of bureaucracy when scientists have worked so hard to get us a vaccine in record time. The NHS is doing a stellar job and home visits offer unique logistical challenges. However, given how much has been done, isn’t it fair to ask: should it be this much of a challenge?

My mother still doesn’t feel like watching much news and, thankfully, BBC’s “Flog It!” doesn’t cover the pandemic, so she isn’t too worried about being one of the last in her age group to get the vaccine. The same cannot be said of those of us looking after her. Our once very private and quiet home is now filled four times a day by strangers. The teams of two carers rotate throughout the week, meaning we are exposed to all comers. Most are wonderful (waves to Vicky, Donna, and Kerry) and wear their PPE properly, but the odd one still turns up with a mask under her nose or sneezing into a sleeve.

It is a constant worry and there is still no sign of the vaccine.