Since the advent of vaccination programmes, many questions have been raised about how to allay the anxieties of patients.

• What is your favoured approach to allay fears for patients who are vulnerable but scared of getting vaccinated?

• How are vaccination programmes progressing where you are based?

The Marsh family have recorded a song as part of the #HaveTheNewJab campaign! We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Tess has always loved this song since learning it at school a few years back - Leonard Cohen's incredible Hallelujah (1984) - and it's always fit beautifully with her range. So with the ongoing race between injections and infections which is particularly acute in the UK at the moment, we figured we'd chip in to try to encourage anyone who might be wavering or hesitant to go ahead and get vaccinated against COVID-19. We'll try to do a more energetic one next time round, but this was right for a Sunday night! Shout out to the Shrek soundtrack, Alexandra Burke, and Jeff Buckley for prompting many domestic arguments about which version is the all-time best :)

Official UK guidance on the vaccines is here: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavirus-vaccination/coronavirus-vaccine/.”

“All of our songs before this one had just been about trying to cheer ourselves up, and to give other people a smile – that was a little contribution that we knew we could make, besides staying out of the way and trying to muddle through. But at the start of this year, we heard through conversations the damage and the hurt that the rumours about COVID and misinformation about vaccines were causing to friends in the NHS – the last thing they needed to deal with on top of everything else. So we figured that we did have a bigger part to play – like everyone does – to try to combat the parallel pandemic of misinformation and mistrust that is running alongside COVID-19. The song is really a message about solidarity with people working in healthcare, about not letting a handful of people on social media wreck the prospects of vaccine uptake, and about finding ways to have conversations with people who are understandably hesitant or confused. We already felt that it was worthwhile sharing it before it went viral, when two local friends separately contacted us about some of their fears (or things they had heard), and we pointed them to some proper guidance and they used it to speak to members of their family. Obviously the song has brought some unpleasantness into our lives (and comments threads) from anti-vaxxers, but that’s a measure of how maybe music can reach people in a softer way than government pronouncements (especially in communities for whom trust in government is compromised). And we feel strongly that our children should be involved in these conversations and exposed to these issues – their futures are at stake as much as anyone’s in getting wider immunity and understanding how important it is to trust expertise and longstanding conventions in science and medicine.”