THE BUSINESS OF COVID-19?
Jabbing against, and swabbing for, the COVID-19 virus are key tactics to control the virus and return life to some form of normal: allowing the elderly and vulnerable to survive, reduce over-crowding in ICUs, develop and educate our children and allow local businesses to thrive.
By Terry Maguire
A
t the end of 2020, I did two things to get more COVID-19 business. I signed up to the call for volunteer vaccinators and I
bought a batch of COVID-19 antigen tests.
I have to admit that there were those who, when forwarding the vaccinator request were, to put it mildly, unenthusiastic. The Pfizer vaccine would never be part of a pharmacy commissioned service so, we were told, we should think twice about signing up.
We can’t afford to have valuable pharmacy staff out of the pharmacy working in large vaccination centres. It’s an important point, but it risked too narrow a perspective.
We needed to be in from the start so, when the Oxford vaccine, not requiring storage at temperatures colder than the south pole in winter, was licensed and rolled out, as it was on January 4, we could be part of a commissioned service.
My pharmacy staff are trained and we have been providing flu vaccination as part of the health service programme since October. In early January, all pharmacy staff were offered their first COVID-19 vaccination as protection should we become vaccinators and I got mine, the mRNA Pfizer vaccine, on January 12. Things were looking good for a pharmacy vaccination service as we reached the peak of the second/third wave and our hospitals were blocked solid with very ill patients.
A pharmacy COVID-19 testing service was never going to plug into the Track and Trace service and it proved difficult to develop and deliver a service commercially. My plan was to have testing in the pharmacy very early in the pandemic.
For practical reasons, last April, we focused on antibody testing as it was inexpensive and came in a Point-of-Care format requiring only a finger-stick blood sample and producing results in minutes but it soon became clear that a pharmacy COVID-19 antibody testing service, due to a lack of clarity on what a positive or negative test result meant clinically, should not be provided.
Even then, there was no certainty that having antibodies for this virus meant a person would
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scottishpharmacist.com
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