Vaccinate five- to 11-year-olds to protect UK schools, scientists say | Coronavirus
Leading scientists have called for the vaccination of younger children to allow as many as possible to stay in school next year as Omicron cases rise dramatically across the UK.
Prof Peter Openshaw, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), said that without vaccinating children there could be further huge disruption to education and that health concerns about infection now outweighed initial justified caution in extending vaccination to five- to 11-year-olds.
“There was more uncertainty earlier. It’s now becoming clearer that vaccination is generally safe and that it’s better to be vaccinated than to be infected,” he said. “To my mind it’s clear: the safest option is to be vaccinated.”
Deepti Gurdasani, clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, said that schooling would “not be feasible” next year without extending the vaccination programme to primary school age groups. “There’s been no discussion of how we’re going to protect children in January when schools reopen,” she said. “The US has vaccinated five million children. The EMA [European Medicines Agency] has approved, FDA [US Food and Drug Administration] has approved, there’s no word from the MHRA [the UK regulator] which is quite stunning.”
Openshaw said that there is some evidence that Omicron is reproducing more efficiently in younger age groups, meaning that the vaccination of children could be especially important. It is not clear whether extending vaccination to primary school children would be able to happen quickly enough to affect the oncoming wave of cases, which is expected to peak early next year. But Openshaw added: “The ‘too late’ argument is not a good one. We’d always prefer to have done something three months ago. The second best time is now.”
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is currently reviewing data on Covid jabs for children over five as a “matter of urgency” and expected to give a recommendation if the UK’s medicine regulator gives the green light for vaccines to be administered to younger age groups. June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA, has said that it is “very likely” an assessment of whether to approve the Pfizer vaccine for children as young as five would be concluded before Christmas.
The FDA authorised the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine for use among 5- to 11-year-olds in late October, and the EU’s regulator, the EMA, followed suit in November.
Previously, the JCVI said that the use of vaccines for healthy children could not be recommended on health grounds alone, saying that children were at such low risk from the virus that vaccines would offer only a marginal benefit to them. This had to be weighed against the possibility of an extremely rare side effect of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that causes heart inflammation.
However, as more data has become available, including the vaccination of 5 million five- to 11-year-olds in the US with no reports of myocarditis or other red flags, the argument for vaccinating children has become more compelling, Openshaw said. “I’m very concerned about what the long-term effects of infection with Sars-CoV-2 will be on health and wellbeing for children,” he said. “We don’t know yet what twists and turns this virus might have.”
Kit Yates, senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath, said: “Once the MHRA have given their approval for the vaccine for five- to 11-year-olds we should be rolling out the offer of vaccination to that age group quickly. The evidence from the trials and the real world administration of the vaccine to children across the world have demonstrated it to be safe and effective.”
Yates added: “Whilst children do seem, so far, to have suffered less sever consequence of Covid than older age groups, it is not the case that children do not get ill or die from Covid. Certainly, fears that new variants might affect children more severely, have focused attention back on the issue of vaccinating children for children’s sake rather than simply to protect others.”
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