Think carefully about Covid booster jabs and roll-out to children, says expert ‘raises ethics questions’

The UK needs to “think very carefully” before pressing ahead with the widespread vaccination of younger children and booster jabs for adults, an expert said on Wednesday.

Professor Andrew Hayward said there was a case for top-up third doses for the most vulnerable but questioned the ethics of a wider roll-out of vaccines at a time when millions of the world’s poorest citizens remained unprotected.

It came as the Office for National Statistics today estimated that 94.1 per cent of adults in England would have tested positive for Covid antibodies in the most recent fortnight, ether due to vaccination or “natural” protection from infection — the highest rate on record.

One report suggested that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation was resisting pressure to approve jabs for children aged 12 to 15 amid concerns of a knock-on impact on providing boosters to the over-fifties this autumn.

Professor Hayward, of University College London’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care, who sits on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, said the UK had ordered sufficient vaccines to donate between 100 million and 200 million doses to poorer nations by the end of the year.

Asked whether the UK should press ahead with top-up jabs and expand the roll-out to younger children, Professor Hayward told the BBC’s Today programme: “We need to think very carefully, now that we have vaccinated and protected the great majority of the vulnerable people within our country, about how we use booster doses. There is a case for vaccinating the most vulnerable again with booster doses.

“But that still leaves the UK massively over-ordered in terms of the amount of vaccines that it has, and still conservatively leaves somewhere between 100 million and 200 million doses that it could donate by the end of the year.”

At the G7 summit in Cornwall in June, one billion doses — including 100 million from the UK — were pledged to poor nations. But Professor Hayward said 11 billion doses were needed.

The Pfizer and Moderna jabs have been cleared by the regulator for use in children aged 12-15 but a decision is awaited from the JCVI. One concern, reported by The Independent, is the need to provide a third jab for the most elderly, whose immunity levels are falling fastest.

Up to one in seven children who caught coronavirus might have suffered from long Covid, the world’s biggest such study revealed today. But the UK researchers said the findings were unlikely to influence the JCVI in deciding whether to offer the vaccine to 12 to 15-year-olds.