How the Childhood Vaccination Programme Works

Getting vaccinations is an important part of caring for your child’s health as those jabs can protect your child against some potentially serious illnesses. Child vaccinations can help to protect other people too and even to eliminate diseases forever.

What Happens When Your Child is Vaccinated?

• The vaccine contains a dead or weakened form of the disease, so there is no chance that it will make your child ill, but the immune system will still recognise it as a potential threat


• Your child’s immune system will produce antibodies against the disease. These antibodies are able to recognise the specific bacteria or virus from the vaccine so that the immune system can attack them.


• Once it has produced antibodies for a particular disease, the immune system will remember how to make them. If the disease enters the body again, the antibodies can then be produced much more quickly. They will target the virus or bacteria and ensure it is eliminated.

Other Effects of Vaccination

The benefits of child vaccinations go beyond protecting the individual. When we are all vaccinated, we benefit from something called “herd immunity”. We are safer when the people around us have been vaccinated too, because it makes it harder for diseases to survive and spread. Herd immunity matters because:

• Some people haven’t been vaccinated, because they are too young, they missed a childhood vaccination, the vaccine wasn’t available when they were a child, or they weren’t able to have it for medical or religious reasons.


• Vaccines aren’t 100% effective, so there is a chance you could catch a disease even after you’ve been vaccinated against it.


• The effects of vaccination aren’t always permanent, especially if you haven’t completed all of your child vaccinations yet.

However, there is one more benefit of vaccination that is even more important. When enough of us are vaccinated for long enough, we can eradicate diseases. If there aren’t enough people around for the disease to infect, it dies out. We’ve already eliminated a lot of diseases from the UK and smallpox has been eradicated worldwide, thanks to vaccination. In the future, we should be able to eradicate even more diseases, which might mean that one day, none of our children will need jabs.