Chris Whitty says disruption ‘extraordinarily difficult for children’ and informed decision to recommend vaccinating 12- to 15-year olds
- UK children aged 12 to 15 to be offered Covid jab
- Fully vaccinated people account for 1.2% of England’s Covid-19 deaths
- Thérèse Coffey accused of getting universal credit figures wrong
- Global coronavirus updates – live
Today’s update to the UK government’s Covid dashboard shows that 1,076 coronavirus patients were admitted to hospital in the UK on Tuesday 7 September. UK hospital admission figures on the dashboard are always several days old, but this is still a striking figure because it is the highest since 23 February (when there were 1,120 admissions). It is also only the fourth time since the winter that the daily figure has been in four figures.
The dashboard also shows that there have been 30,825 new cases and 61 further deaths. The total number of new cases over the past seven days is down 8.4% on the previous week, but deaths are up 25.1% week on week.
Although Prof Wei Shen Lim, chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said today there was no conflict between what his committee said at the start of the month and what the chief medical officers are saying now, that is not obvious from the JCVI’s statement from 3 September.
The JCVI said that looking at educational issues was not part of its remit. But it also implied that a vaccine programme for this age group might be problematic. It said:
Delivery of a Covid-19 vaccine programme for children and young people is likely to be disruptive to education in the short term, particularly if school premises are used for vaccination and there is potential for a Covid-19 vaccine programme to impact on the efficiency of rollout of the influenza programme. Adverse reactions to vaccination (such as fevers) may also lead to time away from education for some individuals.
There is considerable uncertainty regarding the impact of vaccination in children and young people on peer-to-peer transmission and transmission in the wider (highly vaccinated) population. Estimates from modelling vary substantially, and the committee is of the view that any impact on transmission may be relatively small, given the lower effectiveness of the vaccine against infection with the Delta variant.