Table 2.

Interview key quotations: Theme 1—Historical and social context.

Themes	Sub-Themes	Quotations
1. Historical and social context	Historical mistrust of vaccines	Interestingly, very common among Afro-Caribbean women, in particular, that they feel that it’s not something for them, because of that problem. And of course, that comes in with the history of vaccination usage over the last century, of how black people were used, for example, as guinea pigs, and I think that inheritance of information, makes people a little bit sceptic and fearful of using the vaccine.—H007
	Exclusion of marginalised groups	We take a very cautious approach to vaccines and pregnancy, which is right. Everybody remembers the thalidomide scandal, and the last thing we want to do is offer vaccines which are safe in the general population to pregnant women where it turns out not to be safe. What this does though is it leads to a bit of caution in terms of clinical trials and at the end of the day, you do a trial, you exclude pregnant women and you don’t know whether the vaccine is safe in pregnancy. Over time, that rectifies itself because some women who didn’t know they were pregnant when they had the vaccine turn out to be pregnant, and you build up the evidence base that way. In this case, there was such an enormous time pressure to develop a vaccine and roll it out, so we ended up being in the position where we had to roll out the vaccine without knowing it was safe for pregnant women, so you had to tell pregnant women “We’re not offering you the vaccine at the moment.—M012
	Pre-existing knowledge and positive outlook	But also, I think the thing that was missing is that a lot of people were saying, “Well, it’s untested,” and that wasn’t actually true. There’s a lot of that technology that we are already aware of, and we can apply it to lots of different diseases. So I didn’t have those sorts of concerns that other people had. I did find the [Vaccine] blood clots quite alarming, like everybody. And when I was able to get a vaccine, I had the [Vaccine] one. And I was very relieved about that because I am at a much higher risk of blood clots because of the various conditions I had during pregnancy.—W021

Key: W = women, P = partner, H = HCP, and M = policy maker.