Ministers will “very soon” make a decision on extending vaccinations to teenagers aged under 18, housing secretary Robert Jenrick has said.
Mr Jenrick said it seemed “sensible” to extend jabs initially to children just short of their 18th birthday and those with particular health vulnerabilities.
His comments came amid reports that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) will on Monday advise against offering the jab to all over-12s until more evidence is available on the risks.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the expert panel will instead call for vaccination to be offered to children aged between 12 and 15 who are deemed vulnerable to Covid-19, or who live with adults who are immuno-suppressed or otherwise at severe risk from the disease, as well as to 17 year-olds who are within three months of their 18th birthday.
Eminent virologists today told The Independent that there was no compelling safety or ethical reason to withhold jabs from over-12s and called on Boris Johnson to move swiftly to vaccinating all teenagers.
And epidemiologist Neil Ferguson told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “In the absence of vaccinating teenagers, it’s inevitable that we are going to have – and we are already seeing – very high numbers of cases in teenagers.
“We won’t be able to reach herd immunity without significant immunity among people under 18.”
Millions of over-12s have been inoculated in countries including the US without significant ill-effects, though the US Centre for Disease Control has identified around 300 cases of heart inflammation in teens after the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
Mr Jenrick told Sky News’ Sunday with Trevor Phillips: “We will be taking advice in the coming days from the JCVI – we haven’t yet received their final advice – on whether to extend the vaccine rollout to children.
“That seems like a sensible thing to do.
“And so we will be looking carefully at their advice … on whether or not we should open up the vaccine programme in the first instance to most children who are just short of their 18th birthday, to those children who have particular vulnerabilities and those children who are in households where there are people who are particularly vulnerable.
“That seems like a sensible way for us to proceed. But ministers will need to make that decision when they’re armed with the final advice from the JCVI, our expert advisors, and I expect that we will be receiving that advice very soon.”
Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth urged the JCVI and ministers to “carefully consider” whether it was really necessary to hold back from vaccinating teenage children.
“I’m not against making children,” he told Phillips. “I think it needs to be looked at by the JCVI. Other countries are doing it. I don’t understand why we’re not proposing it.
“In the end, these are always clinical decisions, but if the JCVI are going to propose tomorrow that we are not going to vaccinate children, I hope they can fully explain their thinking and why they taken a different decision to the United States.”
