Summary

The information in this bulletin, about immunisation statistics in England, comes from:

1. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) Centre for Infections (CfI) for information on:

• childhood immunisation uptake at ages 1, 2 and 5 collected through the Cover of Vaccination Evaluated Rapidly (COVER) data collection for PCTs
• persons aged 65 and over immunised against influenza for all PCTs

2. The NHS Information Centre (The NHS IC) for information about the BCG programme and reinforcing doses on the KC50 return from known providers of immunisation services.

Key Facts

• after falling to 80 per cent in 2003-04 uptake of the MMR vaccine, for children reaching their second birthday, increased steadily to 85 per cent in 2006-07 and has remained at 85 per cent in 2007-08*
• for children reaching their second birthday, uptake of vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, polio, pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b and meningitis C was between 93 per cent and 94 per cent and has been unchanged for the last five years*
• there were nearly 220,000 BCG vaccinations in 2007-08 an increase of 26 per cent on the previous year (172,000) given to those in specified at risk categories. While this increase may be due, in part, to increased familiarity with the new BCG policy, it may also be due to better recording and reporting of BCG immunisation
• in the first year of reporting (as experimental data), uptake of the Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) was 84 per cent for children immunised by their first birthday
• the number of people aged 65 and over immunised against influenza was 74 per cent in 2007-08, no change from the previous year

* Data on childhood immunisation should be treated with some caution as small movements could be partly due to data issues in London where uptake rates are lower than elsewhere in the country. See section on Data Quality.

Please note - Due to a rounding error Table B in the text displayed the incorrect 24 month uptake of the MMR vaccine at an England level (figure of 84 per cent which has been amended to 85 per cent). This has since been rectified and is correct as of 27/01/2009