Vaccinate household members
We are calling on the Government to protect people with blood cancer from the coronavirus by prioritising the vaccine for adults who live with them.
Many people with blood cancer have compromised immune systems, and vaccines do not usually work as well on people with weaker immune systems. That's why vaccinating adults who live with people with blood cancer could be an important way of protecting them.
At the moment, household members of the 200,000 people with blood cancer who are clinically extremely vulnerable are not on the priority list. This is because there is not yet good data on whether the vaccines prevent transmission, and so we can’t be sure that vaccinating members of a household will help protect the people they live with.
But one of the reasons the Government is prioritising healthcare workers is the hope that this will help them prevent passing the virus on to their vulnerable patients. We think the same should apply to household members of people with blood cancer.
We have written to the Health Secretary, the Vaccine Deployment Minister and ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to make the case for taking the same approach to household members of people with blood cancer, and called for them to be added to the priority list. Help us make the case by emailing your local MP (or equivalent in Scotland, Wales and NI) and ask them to raise this issue with the relevant government too. You can also follow us on social media and help amplify our message.
