Only two people have died with the Indian Covid variant after being fully vaccinated, official figures show, raising hopes ‘freedom day’ is still on track for June.
Public Health England analysis shows only 177 out of 5,599 people — three per cent — who caught the mutant strain and presented to A&E had already had both jabs. Almost 3,400 had not yet had their first dose.
The figures show of the 12 people who have died with the variant in England by May 25, eight were unvaccinated, two had a first dose, and two had both doses of a vaccine.
Other promising data showing the success of the jab blitz shows the average age of people testing positive is now just 29, the youngest ever recorded and down from 41 at the start of the year. If the trend stays the same, But plans to go ahead with ‘Freedom Day’ on June 21 hang in the balance because of the rapid spread of the Indian variant, with cautious scientists calling for ministers to delay the final step on the roadmap back to normality.
The fast-spreading B.1.617.2 strain is now behind up to three quarters of all cases in the UK, and has been found in more than 250 of England’s 300-plus authorities.
Ministers are working to scrap social distancing but keep face masks and work from home guidance in place after June 21.
The Treasury is said to be prioritising the end of the ‘one metre plus’ rule and the ‘rule of six’ indoors, in a bid to kickstart the British economy which has been battered by successive lockdowns since March last year.
Though the Government wants to end restrictions on mass gatherings to allow festivals, concerts and sporting events to go ahead, ministers are said to be worried that the variant could jeopardise the roadmap and are discussing contingency plans that would mean only a partial end to shutdown.
A Sage member today said the ‘confusion’ over the Government’s handling of Covid restrictions is undermining efforts to control the virus.
Professor Stephen Reicher, a psychologist on the Sage sub-committee advising ministers on behavioural science, said the Government is in a ‘pickle’ because it appears to have abandoned the ‘data not dates’ principle.
Experts have argued that restrictions should remain in place until more people have received both doses of a vaccine, amid reports that ministers are drawing up plans for a partial end of lockdown.
It comes as a Government advisor today said scientists advising ministers on vaccines are likely to set out a ‘range of options’ on the potential immunisation of children against coronavirus.
Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said deciding whether to vaccinate children is a ‘complicated’ issue.
Public Health England analysis shows of the 12 people who have died with the variant in the country, eight were unvaccinated, two had a first dose, and two had both doses of a vaccine
More promising data from PHE show that the effects of the variant on vaccinated people are significantly less – out of 5,599 cases only 177 were found to be in people who had had both doses, and only one out of 43 hospital admissions was. Infections, hospitalisations and deaths were all significantly more common in unvaccinated people
NHS Test and Trace data yesterday showed the majority of people testing positive for Covid in the UK were in the younger age brackets
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on this morning, Professor Reicher said: ‘I think we are in a pickle of the Government’s own making at the moment.
‘I think the reason for that is it has departed from its own mantra of ‘data not dates’. Very quickly ‘data not dates’ became ‘dates not data’.
‘People were promised that things would happen on particular dates and they invested so much in them, and the Government invested so much political capital in them, that it became very difficult to do anything else if the data suggested it was unwise.’
Current data suggests that, although hospital admissions are rising in some parts of the country affected by the Indian variant, overall admissions remain broadly flat.
Meanwhile, the reproduction number – the R value – for England is 1 to 1.1, up from 0.9 and 1.1 the previous week, suggesting the epidemic is growing.
Professor Reicher said: ‘The data we are seeing at the moment suggests we have a problem.
‘We don’t know how big the problem is – it might be bad, it might be very bad, we will learn in the next week or two.
‘But the problem for the Government is on the one hand it can’t delay what it has been promising for so long, but on the other hand it is aware of the dangers of so doing.
‘And so you see that in the fact that they are beginning to act in a rather contradictory way.
‘They’re saying to us, for instance, on travel, ‘You can travel internationally but please don’t’.
‘They say of social contact ‘You can hug, but please don’t hug’. They say of restrictions ‘No restrictions but please don’t go in and out of the hotspots’.
‘That contradiction, that sense of confusion, I think is undermining the response.’
He warned that it would be a ‘big blow’ to the country’s recovery if a ‘third wave’ was to force it ‘backwards’.
‘I think it’s really important to take the data really seriously and act as strongly as we can to make sure that what at the moment is a potential crisis doesn’t turn into a real crisis,’ he added.
PHE data shows how Covid outbreaks are growing across the country. The map on the left shows how around half of England’s 149 upper-tier authorities saw infection rates grow compared to the week before, with areas shaded red witnessing at least a 50 per cent spike in infections. Councils coloured green saw fewer positive tests than the week before. Meanwhile, the map on the right shows exactly the same but for the previous seven-day spell ending May 16
Separate data today revealed that there was around 49,000 people infected in England on any given day in the week ending May 22 – a similar figure to the week before. The Office for National Statistics, which carries out a huge surveillance testing project that is closely watched by ministers, said rates ‘continue to be low but there are potential signs of an increase’. Other health chiefs say data nationally may be being skewed by extra testing in hotspots
Professor Harnden told BBC Breakfast on Saturday: ‘Clearly, with children, there are a range of different options that involve whether we select certain children to be immunised on the basis of risk.
‘We do know that the majority of children do not have huge risk of complications – whether we vaccinate for educational purposes, whether we vaccinate to protect others in the population, these are the ethical issues, there are a lot of issues to think about.
‘It’s a complicated position to decide on the immunisation of children, of course; then there’s the wider global ethical argument about the use of vaccine in children when there are other people in the world that are at risk of not being vaccinated.
‘So we need to think about all these issues; we probably will give the Government a range of options.
‘But on the whole they’ve been very good at listening to our advice, and our strategy on JCVI to date has been so good and I’m very thankful that the Government have listened to it.’
He added: ‘It’s complicated, but we will think through these issues deeply and give some really good advice.’
Professor Harnden said vaccines do help to tackle Covid transmission but ‘only to a certain extent’ and therefore ‘I don’t think we will be able to vaccinate children to prevent huge amounts of transmission within the community’.
His comments came after a JCVI source told the Daily Telegraph it is expected to set out ‘options and consequences’ of vaccinating children rather than offering a firm recommendation for ministers to follow.
The source said: ‘It’s likely that the JCVI will come up with a menu of options saying what the consequences of each of them would be, rather than making an actual recommendation.’
It follows the European Medicines Agency recommending the use of the vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech be extended to children aged 12 to 15.
Klaus Okkenhaug, professor of immunology in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, said the Pfizer vaccine could be a potential candidate to use on children due to its safety record.
Appearing on Times Radio, he conceded it was a ‘fair point’ when it was put to him that one or two ‘bad cases’ of vaccine side-effects could ‘spook’ a large number of people.
Professor Okkenhaug said: ‘I think the lower in age we go, the lower the risk from the virus is, then the more risk-averse we become with relation to the vaccine.’
He highlighted that, with data from the tens of millions of people who have been vaccinated, ‘if you go for children, you would want to go for the safest vaccine’.
‘And I think probably an argument could be that for children you go for the Pfizer, if that pans out, as it looks to be, (to) have an even better safety record.’
Professor Okkenhaug said the decision on whether to give children jabs is a ‘difficult question’ which requires balancing wider benefits against the direct ones for children.
‘I think for a whole population it would of course help for children to be vaccinated because it also reduces their opportunities to transmit this virus to their teachers,’ he said.
Professor Okkenhaug added that when considering the ‘direct benefits to the children’ it is ‘a little bit of a fine balance because they are so unlikely to be affected by the virus’.
‘But I think, given the phenomenal safety records of some of the vaccines out there, there’s a good argument for going ahead at least with older children, say 12 and above.’
Professor Okkenhaug said the idea of using a nasal spray to administer the Covid vaccine to children was ‘really interesting’, with the approach used before for flu vaccines, but there was a current lack of data.
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