NHS told to prepare for vaccine rollout to 12-year-olds, reports say

No decisions made yet, government says

The NHS in England has been told to prepare to roll out coronavirus vaccines to all children over 12, instead of just the most vulnerable, it has been reported.

The Daily Telegraph cited NHS England operational emails in a report that said the service was looking at a 6 September start date for the expansion.

Health trusts had been told to provide details by 4pm on Friday of how they could inoculate 75 per cent of children aged 12 to 15 by the beginning of November, the paper reported.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is yet to make a recommendation on whether this expansion should take place, however.

The Department of Health said no decisions had been taken on rolling out jabs to all over-12s, but confirmed that planning “for a range of scenarios” had taken place.

Results of a study into vaccine side-effects in children of that age who are at high risk of Covid-19 complications are due to be made public later on Thursday.

Advisers in the UK are being cautious when it comes to widening the jabs rollout, but "waiting and watching costs time", one public health expert has said.

Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I think the issue is they are being very cautious.

"They're waiting and watching and I guess the issue with a pandemic is that waiting and watching costs time.

"And time is the currency now that matters because it's not like we can wait and watch and in six months say 'OK, it's safe, let's vaccinate'.

"In those six months if a large percentage of 12- to 15-year-olds get infected, in some ways they've lost that window of time and so I think perhaps they don't feel the urgency that they should be feeling given it's an emergency situation and we have Delta, which is so infectious. I mean, it's just flying through schools as we know.

"Not just here – Germany, Denmark, even places like New Zealand and Australia are struggling with Delta compared to the original virus."

According to Public Health England’s latest figures, some 47,792,552 people have received their first dose of a vaccine and 42,072,712 are fully inoculated.

Additional reporting by Press Association