Join our panel of speakers to discuss the Covid-19 vaccination programme in the context of building a national collection around Covid-19 for use now and in the future.

Guest Speakers:

Professor Sheena Cruickshank: Academic Lead for Public Engagement with Research. Sheena is an immunologist and science communicator at the University of Manchester. She is a part of the COVID Immunology Consortium advisory board who are conducting research into the immunology of COVID19 and she also has done a lot of communication work around COVID and vaccines in the media and in local communities and worked with groups such as the British Society for Immunology and American Association for the Advancement of Science to help shape conversations around COVID and vaccines.

Dr Sohail Munshi: Sohail has been a GP for 24 years. He is currently Chief medical officer for Manchester and Trafford LCOs which bring together GPs, community services and social care to improve population health outcomes. He was recognised in the Queens honours for creating England's largest GP federation back in 2018 and was also appointed as a senior clinical advisor to the National medical director for Primary Care to support work on Covid vaccinations and primary care in England earlier this year.Covid-19’s social significance as a public health crisis is unprecedented in living memory and a watershed in the longer history of the National Health Service (NHS). The ways in which we live, work, and think about our health have changed profoundly and the story is not over yet. We do not know how, or when Covid-19 will pan out, but we do know that we are all actors in an historic moment.

Vaccines have been one of the most vital healthcare interventions in the history of medicine and save millions of lives every year. Vaccine research and development has been at the heart of the global response to the pandemic and the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination programme is the largest to date. Yet there have been many challenges including the logistics of coordinating large numbers of patients; storing the Pfizer vaccine correctly; policy decisions about the lengthening the gap between doses; and responding to people’s anxieties about the vaccine. The need to share vaccine supplies across the world also raises ethical dilemmas for nations.

Our aim is to build a diverse and representative collection of Covid-19 personal testimonies across the four nations of the UK that will serve both the present and the future. History tells us that, as in the case of the Spanish Flu, collective memory can fade rapidly after health crises. So what do we need to capture about the Covid-19 vaccination programme that will help us respond to future pandemics and health crises?

• How can the history of vaccines and vaccination programmes shape our thinking about the Covid-19 vaccination programme?

• How do we capture the hope, resilience and community spirit embedded in the rollout of the vaccination programme?

• In what ways have faith communities contributed to the vaccination programme?

• Why is it important for us to engage with people’s fear and hesitancy around the vaccine?

• What policy issues have been raised by the vaccination programme?

• And at global level, what ethical issues does the vaccine raise?

This series of events is part of a major public history programme – NHS Voices of Covid-19 – led by Professor Stephanie Snow and the NHS at 70 team at The University of Manchester and undertaken in partnership with the British Library. Supported by a grant from UK Research and Innovation, through the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we are developing a national collection of personal testimonies and in-depth reflections around Covid-19 that will be preserved as a permanent public resource for informing policy and practice and form part of a wider British Library Covid-19 collecting initiative.

NHS Voices of Covid-19 In conversation with: Vaccination and Covid-19