UK Covid: jabbing 12- to 15-year-olds will reduce impact of school disruption on children’s mental health – Whitty

Torsten Bell, the head of the Resolution Foundation, a thinktank specialising in issues relating to poverty and low paid, has posted a detailed thread on Twitter explaining why Thérèse Coffey was so wrong about universal credit claimants being able to make up for the lost £20 by working an extra two hours a week. (See 1.50pm.) It starts here.

The UK’s four chief medical officers – Prof Chris Whitty (England), Dr Gregor Smith (Scotland), Dr Frank Atherton (Wales) and Dr Michael McBride (Northern Ireland) – will hold a press conference about their decision to recommend vaccinating 12 to 15-year-olds. It is at 4pm.

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy CMO for England, Dr June Raine of the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and Prof Wei Shen Lim of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation are also due to attend.

Headteachers are receiving letters from pressure groups threatening legal action if schools take part in Covid vaccination programmes, according to Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. He said:

Many of our members have been receiving letters from various pressure groups threatening schools and colleges with legal action if they take part in any Covid vaccination programme.

This is extremely unhelpful and we would ask those involved in this correspondence to stop attempting to exert pressure on schools and colleges.

The question of whether or not to offer vaccinations to this age group has clearly been thoroughly considered and the decision on whether or not to accept this offer is a matter for families.

The National Education Union has welcomed the decision to vaccinate 12 to 15-year-olds, but said it should have happened sooner. This is from Mary Bousted, the union’s joint general secretary.

The decision by the chief medical officers to encourage the take up of vaccinations by 12-15 year olds will be another tool to help pupils sustain their access to education throughout the autumn and winter.

While we recognise that a decision on vaccinating children needed careful evidential judgement, it would have been better if a decision could have been made earlier during the summer holidays.

Coronavirus vaccine boosters are not appropriate for the general population at this stage of the pandemic, according to global experts, PA Media reports. PA says:

A review by an international group of scientists found that vaccine efficacy against severe Covid-19, even the Delta variant, is so high that top-up doses are not currently needed.

Experts looked at the available evidence from randomised controlled trials and observational studies published in peer-reviewed journals and pre-print servers.

The observational studies revealed that vaccines remained highly effective against severe disease, including that from all the main viral variants.

Averaging the results reported from the observational studies, vaccination had 95% efficacy against severe disease both from the Delta variant and from the Alpha variant.

The jabs were more than 80% effective at protecting against any infection from these variants.

Across all vaccine types and variants, vaccine efficacy is greater against severe disease than mild disease, the review suggests.

Although vaccines are less effective against asymptomatic disease or against transmission than against severe disease, even in populations with high vaccination coverage the unvaccinated minority are still the major drivers of transmission, as well as being themselves at the highest risk of serious disease, experts said.

The PA Media report is based on a study published by The Lancet. Dr Ana-Maria Henao-Restrepo, a vaccine specialist at the World Health Organization (WHO), and lead author of the study, said:

Taken as a whole, the currently available studies do not provide credible evidence of substantially declining protection against severe disease, which is the primary goal of vaccination.

The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine.

Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated.

If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants.

As PA Media reports, the authors note that even if antibody levels wane in vaccinated people over time, this does not necessarily predict reductions in the efficacy of vaccines against severe disease. This could be because protection against severe disease is not only provided by antibody responses – which might be relatively short-lived for some vaccines, but is also provided by other immune responses created by the body.

The experts say that if boosters are ultimately to be used, there will be a need to identify specific circumstances where the benefits outweigh the risks.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO chief scientist and a co-author, said:

The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives.

Although the idea of further reducing the number of Covid-19 cases by enhancing immunity in vaccinated people is appealing, any decision to do so should be evidence-based and consider the benefits and risks for individuals and society.

These high-stakes decisions should be based on robust evidence and international scientific discussion.

Here is a link to the report.

And here is the appendix.

The report may be embarrassing for the government because ministers are keen to go ahead with a booster programme for older people, even though some scientists on the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation do not believe it is necessary. An announcement is expected very soon.

Children aged 12 to 15 will be given Covid vaccinations, the UK’s four chief medical officers have decided, setting aside the view of the government’s vaccine watchdog that the clinical benefits of such jabs were too minimal to justify them, my colleague Peter Walker reports.

In her speech to the TUC conference this morning, Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said that coronavirus could have been contained more easily if decent sick pay had been available, care workers had got proper PPE, and bad bosses who put staff safety at risk had been prosecuted. She said:

In the pandemic, unions have shown the value we bring. When we are in the room and our voices are heard.

But look at the price we all pay when unions are shut out and ignored. Who can doubt that we could have slowed down the virus, if everyone had had decent sick pay?

Or if care workers had got proper PPE from the start? Or if bad bosses, who put staff safety at risk, had felt the full force of the law, [had been] prosecuted and fined?

She also said that staffing and supply problems in the economy should be addressed by higher wages. She said:

Ministers may scratch their heads about how to protect supply chains and fill vacancies.

Well, here’s a novel idea: let’s make that industry deliver decent conditions, direct employment and a proper pay rise.

And let’s be clear. After decades of real wage cuts and falling living standards, no one can seriously say working people don’t deserve a pay rise.

I can tell you today just how much workers have lost out since the global financial crash.

If pay had continued to grow at its pre-crash rates the average worker would be £5,900 better off. No wonder household budgets are feeling the pinch.

The biggest threat we face is low demand. And the way to fix low demand is to pay higher wages.

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Speaking to reporters this morning, Sir Keir Starmer said that if the UK chief medical officers recommended giving vaccines to teenagers, Labour would support the move. He said:

If the scientific advice is that it is safe then we’d go with that recommendation.

We’d also suggest there are other mitigations in schools, such as ventilation, which should have been put in place a long time ago.

The work and pensions secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has been accused of not understanding the universal credit system after she said people who would lose £20 a week in payments next month would only have to work two hours extra to make it up, my colleague Peter Walker reports.

The story quotes this tweet explaining Coffey’s error from Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader.

Here are more lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning.

• Downing Street dismissed Nicola Sturgeon’s request for Boris Johnson to let Scotland hold a second independence referendum in a “spirit of cooperation”. (See 11.08am.) Asked how Boris Johnson would respond to her request, the prime minister’s spokesman said:

We’ve said this many times before – ministers and officials across all the UK government departments are focusing on tackling the Covid-19 pandemic and supporting the economic recovery. Scottish people have been clear they want to see the UK government and the devolved Scottish government working together to defeat this pandemic, That’s our priority.

The spokesman also said that Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary, was not speaking for the government when he suggested during the summer that if polls showed 60% of Scots favouring a referendum over a sustained period of time, the government should allow one. Asked if that was the PM’s view too, the spokesman said:

No, we’ve never set a position on that. Our view is, as set out, that now would simply not be the time to be dealing with this.

• The spokesman backed Thérèse Coffey’s suggestion that people affected by the universal credit cut should look to make up the lost £20 per week by working longer hours, or getting a better paid job. (See 9.38am.) Asked about her comments, the spokesman said:

We know people have to adjust to a change in their payment and we are supporting people to increase their incomes in a number of ways.

We are helping people learn new skills so they can progress to better jobs. Indeed our Plan for Jobs provides a number of schemes which will help people learn these new skills and progress in their careers, and we are hiring 13,500 new work coaches to that end.

• The spokesman denied the suggestion that figures showing that officials were asked to investigate more than 300,000 cases of people suspected of ignoring travel quarantine rules in the spring showed that border rules were too lax. Asked about the BBC report, the spokesman said the government had always put in place “the necessary border measures” and that they were some of the toughest in the world. He went on:

Our managed quarantine service is effective at weeding out individuals with new variants. We sequence all those coming in from red list countries, and we believe we are striking the right balance.

• He said the government would only introduce lockdowns again as a last resort. He said:

We are in a very different place than where we were previously when other lockdowns were introduced, thanks to the success of our vaccine programme and other things like therapeutics treatments for coronavirus.

We would only ever consider those sort of measures as a last resort and we will set out in more detail tomorrow what our approach will be should we see a significant increase in cases.

• The spokesman would not give details of why the government has cancelled its vaccine contract with Valneva (see 11.40am), but he said the Valneva vaccine had not been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. He said:

You’ll appreciate this is an ongoing commercial issue, so I’m slightly restricted in what I can say. I appreciate that the company has issued a statement.

At this point, I’m restricted as to what I can say. Broadly, you’ll know that MHRA has not approved a Valneva vaccine.

The comments from the company won’t have any impact on our vaccine supply and did not form any part of our vaccine rollout in autumn and winter. DH [the Department of Health] might be able to say more in due course.

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