# 4086
Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s medical correspondent, has been doing a terrific job for months covering the H1N pandemic in his blog, Fergus on Flu.
Today he addresses the state of the UK’s pandemic vaccination program, and a call for a more aggressive roll out of the vaccine. He also updates us on the latest information out of the DOH.
GPs urged to go 'full throttle' in accelerating vaccination
Fergus Walsh | 08:57 UK time, Friday, 27 November 2009
Around one million people in England are now estimated to have been vaccinated against swine flu.
Across the UK, 10 million doses of the vaccine have been distributed to GPs and hospitals.
That one million figure refers to those in the initial priority groups, such as those with chronic asthma, heart and other organ disease, immune problems and pregnant women.
Clearly there is still a long way to go. There are nine million people in the priority groups in England, and around 11.5 million across the UK. Then add to that the three million or more under fives who will be offered the jab after that.
Professor David Salisbury, Director of Immunisation at the Department of Health said he hoped GPs would now be able to accelerate the vaccination process:
Fergus has a variety of graphs today showing the pandemic’s impact on the UK. Among them is this one, showing the weekly `laboratory confirmed’ H1N1 fatalities.
These numbers are, no doubt, a serious undercount.
And as Fergus explains in his blog, the official estimate of cases in the UK may be off by a factor of 10 or more.
The latest weekly estimate for England was 46,000 cases of swine flu with a cumulative total of 760,000. But since the Health Protection Agency now reckons that one in five children may have had swine flu, that cumulative figure maybe just a tenth of the real total (and that's just my guess).
Follow the link to read the blog in its entirety.
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