UK health chiefs recommend jabs for 12-15 year-olds

LONDON: All children aged between 12 and 15 years should be offered but not required to take vaccinations against coronavirus, the chief medical officers who advise the UK’s four governments, said on Monday.

Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises UK health departments on immunisation, currently says the “margin of benefit, based primarily on a health perspective, is considered too small to support advice on a universal programme of vaccination of otherwise healthy 12 to 15-year-old children at this time”.

But the chief medical officers (CMO) of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland said the vaccines should be made available, after taking into account wider issues such as education and mental health.

The CMOs said vaccinating 12-15 year-olds “will help reduce transmission of Covid-19 in schools”, with around three million children potentially eligible for the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

“Covid-19 is a disease which can be very effectively transmitted by mass spreading events, especially with the Delta variant,” they said. “Having a significant proportion of pupils vaccinated is likely to reduce the probability of such events which are likely to cause local outbreaks in, or associated with, schools.

“They will also reduce the chance an individual child gets Covid-19. This means vaccination is likely to reduce (but not eliminate) education disruption,” they added. Their current plan is for the children to just receive one shot, with the JCVI asked to gather data on whether a second dose will be required.

The JCVI’s advice against giving teenagers shots was based on balancing the health risks of catching Covid with “increasingly robust evidence” that the Pfizer vaccine is linked to rare cases of heart condition myocarditis.

But it said the governments should take further advice, taking into account the wider issues. The four governments of the UK then wrote to the health officials earlier this month, telling them, “we will consider the advice from the CMOs of the 4 nations, building on the JCVI’s advice, in making our decision.”