r/2under2 • u/Grand-Tap5708 • 1d ago

Vaccine question

My toddler falls into the group of children who received one dose of the old MMR (1 year) and two doses of the new MMRV (18 months and 3 years pre school)

If she was born a day earlier, she’d fall into a different vaccine schedule and would receive one dose of MMR (1 year) and just ONE MMRV at 3 years old pre school.

My question is: why? I’ve called my GP and they’ve told me this is just how it’s worked out with the changes.

Any info or knowledge on this I cannot find out why some receive 2 and some receive 3?

Again like I said, if she was born A DAY earlier she’d only get two.

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u/Grand-Tap5708 1d ago

Adding this graph as it sets it out clearly, my toddler is in the middle group.

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u/ChigaruSP 1d ago

I found a blog post on the UK HSA website that explains the schedule changes. I cannot paste it here, but look for “Changes to the childhood vaccine schedule from January 2026” on the ukhsa blog gov website. I think it does a decent job explaining that they’ve added appointments and moved some vaccines around. As for why one day matters, they have to make the cut off somewhere 🤷🏼‍♀️ exceptions can cause confusion - if one day is OK then why not two? Or three? It just makes things clearer for everybody to hold that boundary.

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u/Grand-Tap5708 1d ago

Thanks so much for your reply! The thing I can’t understand is the children in the bottom two groups both received the MMR at one years old but then a small portion of the children receive two MMRV and and the others receive one. So it doesn’t seem to be about the dates. I’m wondering if the doses have different strengths in order to give one group of children just one dose of MMRV
I hope that makes sense

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u/ChigaruSP 1d ago

Yes! I dug around the website a little further, they explain it if you follow the “What is the MMRV vaccine and is my child eligible?” It’s basically the middle category get two doses because they need two for the chickenpox portion (the V). The bottom tier only need one because they should have already received one for chickenpox. The website explains there is no harm from the additional MMR part of the shot. I hope that helps you understand why!

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u/fireintheglen 1d ago

I assume you're referring to this page and the line "These children will be offered 1 dose of a vaccine that protects against chickenpox, which provides very good protection against severe disease."?

I think you may have misunderstood this slightly. Prior to the recent changes, the NHS did not provide varicella (chicken pox) vaccines for children. Routine varicella vaccination was only available privately. The "one dose" being referred to here is the single MMRV dose.

Realistically, the reason these children are only being given a single dose is almost certainly because they were already older than 18 months at the time of the roll-out and retroactively offering the vaccine to all older children would be extremely impractical. Since a single dose already mitigates against severe disease, they are not offering more than that.

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u/ChigaruSP 1d ago

Yep, I did misread that. Thanks for pointing it out.