JCVI WON’T recommend giving Covid vaccine to healthy children aged 12 to 15

Healthy children under the age of 16 do not need to be vaccinated against Covid, the Government’s vaccine advisory panel ruled today.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said the virus posed such a low risk to 12 to 15-year-olds that the benefit of vaccination to their health would be marginal.

However, it is recommending the jabs for 200,000 more children with chronic heart, kidney, lung and neurological conditions in that age group. A total of 350,000 children aged 12 to 15 are now eligible for the vaccine.

The expert panel said that youngsters under 16 with severe conditions have a one in 10,000 chance of falling seriously ill with Covid compared to the one in 500,000 risk for healthy children.

It said that a very rare heart complication associated with the jabs meant the benefits of vaccination ‘only marginally’ outweighed the risks. 

The JCVI has resisted growing pressure from senior ministers and scientists who urged it to follow the likes of the US, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, and the Netherlands, which are pressing ahead with the move.  

However, the JCVI has told the Government to seek advice from elsewhere to determine whether a mass rollout in schools would have wider benefits, such as keeping classrooms open and avoiding future lockdowns.  

The UK’s four chief medical officers will spend the next week weighing up whether vaccinating secondary school-aged children will have a broader benefit on society. 

Newly-eligible under-16s will be offered the Pfizer vaccine because there is enough trial data to show it is safe and effective in youngsters with health conditions.  

This graph shows the number of first doses dished out by age group. The NHS publishes age groups as periods of five years, and groups all those under 18 together. It shows more than 620,000 have already been inoculated among under-18s

Latest estimates from a symptom-tracking app suggested under-18s had the second highest number of Covid cases in the country (blue line). Only 18 to 35-year-olds had a higher number of Covid cases (orange line). That is despite schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland only starting to go back this week. The data is from the ZOE Covid Symptom Study

Latest Public Health England data showed Covid cases are rising fastest among 10 to 19-year-olds (grey line) and 20 to 29-year-olds (green line). Approving Covid vaccines for 12 to 15-year-olds would likely help curb the spread of the virus in the age group, scientists in favour of the move add

It came as official data showed Scotland’s weekly Covid cases have nearly trebled in the fortnight after schools went back after summer there There are fears the rest of the UK will be hit with a similar bang in cases now that classes are resuming this week

The independent medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), has approved the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for people aged 12 and over after they met strict standards of safety and effectiveness.

The JCVI has advised that the health benefits of vaccinating children are marginally greater than the potential known harms. It has advised the government to seek further input from the Chief Medical Officers on the wider impacts.

This includes the impact on schools and young people’s education, which has been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

UK health ministers from across the four nations have today written to the Chief Medical Officers to request they begin the process of assessing the broader impact of universal COVID-19 vaccination in this age group.

They will now convene experts and senior leaders in clinical and public health to consider the issue. They will then present their advice to ministers on whether a universal programme should be taken forward.

People aged 12 to 15 who are clinically vulnerable to COVID-19 or who live with adults who are at increased risk of serious illness from the virus are already eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine and are being contacted by the NHS, to be invited to come forward. The JCVI has advised that this offer should be expanded to include more children aged 12 to 15, for example those with sickle cell disease or type 1 diabetes.

The decision comes exactly a week after the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed preparations were under way to ensure the NHS was ready to offer coronavirus jabs to all 12 to 15-year-olds in England from early September.

The department said they wanted to be ‘ready to hit the ground running’.

Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said: ‘Our Covid vaccines have brought a wide range of benefits to the country, from saving lives and preventing hospitalisations, to helping stop infections and allowing children to return to school.

‘I am grateful for the expert advice that I have received from the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

‘People aged 12 to 15 who are clinically vulnerable to the virus have already been offered a COVID-19 vaccine, and today we’ll be expanding the offer to those with conditions such as sickle cell disease or type 1 diabetes to protect even more vulnerable children.

‘Along with Health Ministers across the four nations, I have today written to the Chief Medical Officers to ask that they consider the vaccination of 12 to 15 year olds from a broader perspective, as suggested by the JCVI.

‘We will then consider the advice from the Chief Medical Officers, building on the advice from the JCVI, before making a decision shortly.’

Scottish Health Minister Humza Yousaf said: ‘I want to thank the JCVI for today’s advice regarding vaccination for 12 -15 year olds.

‘While the JCVI has agreed that the benefits marginally outweigh the risks they are not yet prepared to recommend universal vaccination of 12-15 year olds, however, they have suggested that Health Ministers may wish to ask their respective CMOs to explore the issue further, taking into consideration broader educational and societal impacts. Therefore, I have agreed with the other three UK Health Ministers to write a letter asking the four Chief Medical Officers to consider this latest guidance and explore whether there is additional evidence to suggest it would be beneficial to offer vaccination to all 12 – 15 year olds. We have asked for this further work to be conducted as soon as possible.

‘A further update will be issued once these discussions have taken place.

‘In the meantime, we will offer the vaccine to those children and young people currently recommended.

‘The recent increase in cases of Covid means it remains crucial that everyone who is offered a vaccination takes up the offer.’

Northern Ireland Health Minister Robin Swann: ‘I welcome the extension of the vaccination programme to include a wider group of children aged 12-15 years of age with underlying medical conditions. The importance of vaccination is evident and I would urge those who are eligible to get vaccinated as soon as possible to help protect themselves and those around them.

‘I am also grateful for the JCVI advice on 12-15 year olds and agree that this issue warrants further consideration. It is entirely appropriate that our most senior medical advisers take forward this piece of work urgently. I look forward to seeing their considerations in the near future.’

Welsh Government Health Minister Eluned Morgan said: ‘I would like to thank the JCVI for fully considering the issue of vaccinating 12-15 year olds and for taking the care to form a balanced view. Our intention as it has been from the start of the pandemic is to follow the science and evidence, and I have asked my Chief Medical Officer to provide guidance at the earliest opportunity on the clinical and wider health benefits of vaccinating this age group.’

The Health and Social Care Secretary, Sajid Javid, has asked the NHS to put preparations in place to roll out vaccinations to 12 to 15 year olds, should it be recommended by the Chief Medical Officers.

If this group is offered the vaccine, parental or carer consent will be sought, just as with other school immunisation programmes.

The vaccination programme has so far provided protection to over 48 million people over the age of 16 across the UK – including over 48 million first doses and over 43 million second doses.

The latest data from Public Health England and Cambridge University shows vaccines have saved more than 105,000 lives and prevented 143,600 hospitalisations and 24 million cases in England.

Should the UK jab 12-year-olds? Experts say it’s ‘unethical’ to vaccinate children to protect adults from Covid and claim kids may get ‘better immunity’ if they catch virus naturally — but others warn of school closures and lockdown curbs if we don’t

Scientists and ministers were at war today over whether the UK should be routinely vaccinating children against Covid now that the majority of Western countries are doing so.  

British advisers are resisting growing pressure to roll out jabs to healthy 12 to 15-year-olds despite the US, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Norway and the Netherlands all pressing ahead with the move.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) — an independent body which advises the UK Government on the Covid jab roll-out — claims it’s still not clear if the benefits outweigh the risks.  

Experts pushing back against the plans today argued that it would be ‘ethically dubious’ to jab children solely to protect adults, because Covid itself poses such a tiny risk to youngsters.

Others believe it is better for children to catch Covid and recover to develop natural immunity than to be reliant on protection from vaccines, which studies suggest wanes in months.

Professor Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia, told MailOnline: ‘It is one thing to say have a vaccine to protect your health, but quite another thing to persuade you to have a vaccine to protect my health. One is entirely ethical and the other is dubious.’

And Professor David Livermore, a medical microbiologist at the same university, said natural infection could be a ‘a better first step in the lifelong co-existence’ with the virus than rolling out the jabs.

But the move to jab healthy kids for Covid has been backed by several experts who warn that letting the virus rip through schools could result in more disruptions to education and force lockdown restrictions to be rolled back.

Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at Reading University, told MailOnline today that he would feel comfortable vaccinating children so long as their parents consented. 

He said the wider benefits to keeping schools open and infection rates low outweighed any small risks of side effects from the jabs.  

And in a letter written to the Education Secretary today, a group of scientists said the wider effects curbs would have on children’s learning, health and wellbeing meant it was ‘reckless’ to send secondary children to classes unvaccinated.

The JCVI is believed to be concerned about the small risk of heart inflammation in young people.

Scotland’s weekly Covid cases have nearly trebled in the fortnight after schools went back after summer there, Office for National Statistics data shows. There are fears the rest of the UK will be hit with a similar bang in cases now that classes are resuming this week

Dr Simon Clarke (left), a microbiologist at Reading University, told MailOnline today that children should be vaccinated ‘with their parents’ consent’ because the benefits outweighed the risk of side-effects. He pointed to other countries where the jab has been rolled out to the age group with no safety issues. SAGE adviser Professor Calum Semple has said children should be inoculated in order to avoid further disruption to their education

Scientists were at war over vaccinating children against Covid today. Professor David Livermore (left) says it is ‘plausible’ that immunity from natural infection could last longer for children but Professor Devi Sridhar (right) says the virus could rip through the country again 

Children have only a small risk of becoming seriously ill with Covid and a vanishingly small chance of death, while the jabs are associated with rare cases of myocarditis in young people.

The JCVI said in July there was a risk of the heart inflammation in about one in 20,000 young people after being fully immunised with Pfizer’s vaccine. 

The Moderna jab, which works in a very similar way, is thought to carry the same risk. 

The JCVI ruled against recommending the vaccine to healthy children then because the risk of dying from the virus for them is lower than one in a million.

Fewer than 300 children have been hospitalised with Covid in England since the pandemic began and all but around 20 had underlying health issues. No healthy child is believed to have died from Covid in the UK.  

Professor Hunter said today he was against vaccinating children, although he had faith that whatever decision the JCVI comes to will have been the most informed.

He told MailOnline: ‘The issue around whether we should be vaccinating 12 to 15-year-olds is whether there is enough vaccine to go around people who are vulnerable worldwide.’ 

Professor Hunter added that as the direct benefit of vaccines to children was small because Covid is a mild illness for the overwhelming majority of them.

He said he would prefer to see the doses shipped to developing nations which are struggling to get first doses to vulnerable people.

And he raised doubts about whether it was ethical to vaccinate children against a mild disease in the first place. 

‘If we are going to be vaccinating these children it has got to be in their interest, not in ours,’ he said.

‘It is one thing to say have a vaccine to protect your health, but quite another thing to persuade you to have a vaccine to protect my health. One is entirely ethical and the other is dubious.’

Professor David Livermore, a medical microbiologist at the University of East Anglia, said last week that the world will need to live with Covid for years if not decades — so having a generation of children with natural immunity would help prevent cases spiralling later down the line. 

He said natural infection could be a ‘a better first step in the lifelong co-existence’ with the virus than rolling out the jabs.

He added: ‘There is no direct reason to vaccinate children and adolescents against Covid. They are extremely unlikely to suffer severe disease if infected.

‘Rare but serious side effects have been associated with the vaccines, including blood clots and myocarditis. For older adults and the vulnerable, these are small hazards compared with those from Covid infection, and being vaccinated is obviously prudent. 

‘But for children the risk/benefit ratio is far less clear, and may reverse. The JCVI initially were against vaccinating children on this logic and have provided no clear reason for a change of view.

‘Taking these three points together I can see no good reason to vaccinate under-18s, let alone 12-year-olds.’

And Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London, told MailOnline vaccinating children would ‘use up’ Britain’s supply of jabs designated for boosters for the clinically vulnerable this winter. 

Professor Spector said while vaccinating would reduce cases ‘in an ideal world’, in the immediate term it could take up supply intended for booster shots to older, more vulnerable people who’s own immunity from vaccines given earlier in the year may be on the wane.

He added: ‘With vaccinating children you are going to reduce numbers of infections, but if you do that that means you use up your boosters and so you risk more deaths and hospitalisations at the other end of the spectrum.

‘In the ideal world I would be in favour of doing both [booster shots for the elderly and vaccines for over-12s] but I definitely think we should be giving boosters to kids that have had natural infections.’ 

But an equal number of scientists say that vaccinating children would have indirect benefits to them, such as keeping them in education and avoiding future lockdowns which took a toll on young people’s mental health. 

A group of 12 scientists on Independent SAGE – a group which has attacked the Government for not being strict enough in controlling the virus – wrote to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson today to call for children to receive the vaccine for exactly that reason.

In the letter published in the BMJ they argued that policies in England mean there will soon be a large population who are ‘susceptible’ to the virus mixing in crowded spaces with ‘hardly any mitigations’.

They said children have suffered ‘significant harms’ on their education and wellbing in the pandemic and added: ‘Allowing mass infection of children is therefore reckless.’ 

Earlier school reopenings in Scotland and the US have shown that a lack of ‘adequate mitigations’ is likely to lead to the virus spreading among children, which could further disrupt learning with significant absences due to student and staff illness, they said.

‘England’s policies mean that we will soon have a large susceptible population with high prevalence of infection mixing in crowded environments with hardly any mitigations.’ 

Other signatories include members of the Parent SafeEdForAll group and the National Education Union.

UK medical regulators cleared the Pfizer jab for use on 12- to 15-year-olds in June, declaring it ‘safe and effective in this age group’. The Moderna vaccine was also authorised last month.

Ministers had hoped to vaccinate children during the school holidays to prevent a repeat of the massive disruption seen in schools over the past 18 months.

However, with schools already going back this week and next, hundreds of thousands of pupils will be mixing for weeks before any rollout is approved by the JCVI – if it is approved at all.

Dr Clarke told MailOnline: ‘As long as the data that exists is that there is no greater harm from giving children jabs then children should get vaccinated, with the caveat that there is parental choice.

‘There have been suggestions that the Americans, the Irish, care less about their children than we do — of course they don’t. They are very sensitive about this issue as well.

‘I see no evidence that there is a problem with vaccinating children.’

He said the decision not to inoculate children before they returned to school was a ‘missed window of opportunity’ because the jabs could have reduced transmission of the virus. 

SAGE adviser Professor Calum Semple, from Liverpool University, echoed the scientists views last week, saying that without vaccines children faced yet more ‘disruption’ to their education in the new academic year. 

The Liverpool University expert told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘If you treat children the same way you do with adults, where if you have got double vaccination you no longer need to isolate, that would then allow us to have schools carrying on without such disruption.

‘I think we need to look at vaccinating these children not just as an individual benefit but a benefit to the root, a benefit to the whole of society and school and the education system.’

Professor Devi Sridhar, a public health expert at Edinburgh University, said last week that children should get vaccines to stop the Delta variant ‘flying through’ schools as they reopen.

England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said in June that he backed vaccinating children to avoid any further disruption to their education.

Clinical studies show that vaccines cut the risk of the virus spreading between people, but real-world data suggests they may only reduce this by as much as half.

For comparison, jabs drastically cut the risk of someone being hospitalised or dying from the virus. This is already vanishingly small for children. 

Other scientists are, however, more skeptical about offering vaccines to the age group.  

A Whitehall source said there was ‘palpable frustration’ among Government figures with the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which has so far not approved the jab.

Both Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Sajid Javid are said to be keen to get on with vaccinating secondary school children.

Ministers fear the new academic year will trigger a fresh wave of the virus in classrooms. This means that without a jab, children could face more disruption to their education throughout autumn and winter.

But the JCVI, which is independent of Government, yesterday warned that a decision on the issue was ‘finely balanced’, with one senior committee member bristling at the idea that it should respond to political pressure.

Another said the committee would not be bounced into vaccinating younger children just because many other countries were now doing so. 

Last night one Whitehall source admitted: ‘There is palpable frustration that this is taking so long. The jabs have been approved for months, other countries have been doing it safely for months – we are becoming an outlier.

‘In the meantime, we have missed the window of opportunity in the summer and the schools are going back.’

Publicly, Downing Street insists the matter is purely for the JCVI. But while another Whitehall source said the JCVI had ‘done a great job’ at the start of the vaccination programme, they acknowledged the length of time taken by the committee over children was frustrating.

‘Everything is in place to get this rolled out,’ the source said. ‘We just need a decision.’

Speaking at the weekend, Mr Javid said vaccinating all teenagers would ‘solidify our wall of protection’.

The move is also backed by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, who has warned that countries like Malta are already insisting all over-12s must quarantine on arrival unless they have been fully vaccinated.

A Government source has predicted take-up among younger children would be as high as 16- and 17-year-olds, if and when the green light is given. 

Most Covid curbs have been lifted in schools in England, with children now only required to test themselves twice a week for the virus.

Only those that test positive for the virus will be sent home, but their peers and classmates will be allowed to stay in school providing they test negative. The change came after the ‘bubble system’ sent entire year groups home after just one positive test was detected. 

Britain has been accused of being sluggish to roll out the Covid vaccine to other age groups, as its vaccination drive fell behind other countries.

US regulators approved Pfizer’s jab for 12 to 15-year-olds in May, and has already got at least one dose to 40 per cent (7million) of the age group.

The EU’s regulator also gave the age group the green light to get the jab at the end of May, with many countries quick to start rolling it out.

France began inoculating 12 to 15-year-olds in June, and more than 40 per cent (2million) have already received a first dose.

Italy started rolling out jabs to the age group from July with the aim of inoculating them before schools return. The Netherlands also began rolling out the jabs to secondary school children in July.