Parents were yesterday racing to buy dwindling supplies of the meningitis B vaccine, as the number of names on a petition demanding that it be offered more widely neared record levels.
High Street pharmacists and private clinics were inundated with requests after horrific pictures of two-year-old Faye Burdett hours before her death were released by her family.
Children older than one are not eligible for the vaccine on the NHS, and a worldwide shortage has sparked a frantic scramble from parents seeking to protect their toddlers. Children are considered at highest risk up until the age of five.
A petition to Parliament calling for the vaccine to be offered free on the NHS to children aged up to 11 yesterday broke records and gained more than 500,000 signatures. Only one other government e-petition has passed the 500,000 mark — the call for Donald Trump to be banned from the UK.
Boots said it had run out of supplies and CityDoc, the largest supplier of the vaccine outside of the NHS, said it was unable to offer it to new patients.
Yesterday other clinics were suspected of increasing their prices as demand soared to “crazy” levels. Supplies are not expected to return to normal until June.
Dr Eoghan MacSweeney, commercial director of CityDoc, said it was getting hundreds of calls a day but was unable to take on new patients. He compared it to the panic caused by now-discredited concerns about a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, when parents sought single measles and rubella vaccinations for their children.
Demand has also been fuelled by the department of health’s decision last year to restrict the meningitis B vaccine to two-month-old babies, with boosters at four and 12 months. “I think people thought it’s an infants’ disease, and it’s not,” MacSweeney said. “It’s also a disease of toddlers as well. The NHS decision to introduce a cut-off point created a surge in demand last year that probably swept up a lot of vaccines.
“The death of this child has raised awareness and demand even further. There is now a bottleneck within a bottleneck.”
After Faye died on Valentine’s Day, her mother Jenny, from Maidstone, Kent, published photos of her daughter lying in her hospital bed covered in a rash. She said: “We campaign for change in her memory. There needs to be a roll-out programme to vaccinate all children, at least up to age 11.”
Former England rugby captain Matt Dawson urged people to sign the petition after positing pictures of his son Sami being treated for meningitis at Great Ormond Street Hospital. He said he was also indebted to staff at Chelsea and Westminster hospital for spotting the seriousness of the two-year-old’s condition. Sami has recovered.
Meningitis is an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord. About 1,000 people a year, mainly babies and children, contract meningitis B. About one in 10 will die and one in three suffer debilitating side-effects. Supplies of the drug — Bexsero, which is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline — began running out last month, although Public Health England said the NHS vaccination programme was not affected.
DoctorCall, which has a Harley Street clinic and charges £195 a dose, has had to set up a waiting list. Depending on their age, children need two or three doses.