NEW: Next week, the Government will announce its 'Plan for Living with Covid-19' in England🧵...
Around 500,000 people in the UK are immunosuppressed, including people living with blood cancer and stem cell transplant patients.
Many do not get the same level of protection from the COVID-19 vaccines as everyone else.
Today, with 17 other charities, we're calling for 5 key tests that the plan must meet to give immunosuppressed people the confidence and support they need to live with COVID-19.
Here they are:
1. Directly address people’s concerns 🗣
2. Ensure immunosuppressed people have quick easy access to COVID-19 treatments 💊
3. Maintain free lateral flow tests
4. Improve employment protection and support 👷
5. Set out a plan for preventative treatments 🗨
We’re calling for the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary to urgently hold a press conference, with scientists, to explain how their ‘Plan for Living with Covid’ will protect those who remain at risk from COVID-19.
🩸 We were started in 1960 by a family who lost their 6-year-old daughter to leukaemiaand so funding research into childhood blood cancer has always been a key part of our work.
🔬So this International #ChildhoodCancerDay we wanted to share just how far our research has come...
🎉 Improvements to blood cancer treatments now mean 89% of children survive leukaemia and lymphoma, up from 79% 20 years ago!
🤗This means that 700 more children and young people survived blood cancer who wouldn’t have done if the survival rate had stayed the same. #ICCD2022
🙌The improvement in childhood leukaemia survival has been amazing, and we are so proud of the role our research has played in helping improve treatments for childhood leukaemia...
We’re concerned the Government have announced plans to bring forward the scrapping of isolation rules in England and know how much anxiety and anger it will cause for people in our community.
We’re yet to see the Government set out their plan describing how the country will learn to live with Covid, specifically how people with blood cancer and others who are immunocompromised will be able to return to a normal life.
2/5
That plan must include additional support for our community including employment support & making it as easy as possible to access vital Covid treatments.
Ministers also need to ensure the public know that there are 500,000 in the UK for whom the vaccine is less effective..
3/5
...Since then, this treatment has been approved in the UK for some people with leukaemia and types of lymphoma. It is also currently being looked at as a potential treatment for people with myeloma too 🩸
Thanks to your kind donations, we’re able to fund dedicated researchers like Professor Waseem Quasim's work aims to create a more universal CAR-T cell therapy. His research could lead to people with other blood cancers benefiting from this treatment in the future.
1/ Last night, the Govt issued new guidance for everyone who is clinically extremely vulnerable, but we need specific support for 500,000 people within the group who have compromised immune system and who, as this guidance recognises, the vaccines may not work as well for.
2/ If the Government thinks this constitutes adequate support for people with blood cancer at a time when many of them are hugely worried about the spread of the virus, I am afraid we can add it to the long list of times the Government has let them down.
3/ This guidance contains little by way of practical support for people with blood cancer as they try to keep safe over the difficult weeks ahead.
2/ We’re pleased to see this. While there are aspects of its press release that are still misleading, it is good they have at least now acknowledged there is still lots of uncertainty about vaccine efficacy in immunocompromised people.
3/ But with journalists having already covered the press release, there will be lots of people with blood cancer who may now have the wrong impression. It is vital @PHE_uk publicly acknowledges its error and writes to every journalist who has covered the story.
⚠️A press release and several articles have been published this afternoon with misleading information about how the COVID vaccines “work well” for people who are immunocompromised.
Thread 👇 (1/6)
The study they refer to groups all “immunocompromised” people together, of which vaccine response is only looked at in a small number of people. (2/6)
We don’t know whether this group includes people with blood cancer, and it will include people with other conditions such as Crohn’s and multiple sclerosis.
These diseases all affect the immune system in very different ways. (3/6)