The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Monday 13 September.
“Mr Speaker, with your permission, I would like to make a Statement on our vaccination programme against Covid-19.
We know that vaccinations are our best defence against the virus. Our jabs have already prevented over 112,000 deaths, more than 143,000 hospitalisations and over 24 million infections. They have built a vast wall of defence for the British people.
Earlier this year, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approved the Covid-19 vaccines supplied by Pfizer and Moderna for 12 to 17 year-olds. It confirmed that both vaccines are safe and effective for this age group. Following that decision, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended vaccination for all 16 and 17 year-olds and for 12 to 15 year-olds with serious underlying health conditions. It next looked at whether we should extend our offer of vaccination to all 12 to 15 year-olds, which would have brought us into line with what is already happening in countries such as France, Spain, Italy, Israel and the United States of America. It concluded that there are health benefits of vaccinating this cohort, although they are finely balanced.
It was never in the JCVI’s remit to consider the wider impacts of vaccinations, such as the benefits for children in education or the mental health benefits that come from people knowing that they are protected from this deadly virus. It therefore advised that the Government may wish to seek further views on those wider impacts from the United Kingdom’s chief medical officers. The Secretary of State, together with the Health Ministers from the devolved nations, accepted that advice. Our CMOs consulted with clinical experts and public health professionals from across the United Kingdom, such as the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. They have also benefited from having data from the United States of America, Canada and Israel, where vaccines have already been offered to children aged 12 to 15 years old.
Early this morning, we received advice from the chief medical officers, along with our counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We have made that advice publicly available and deposited it in the Library at 2 pm today. The unanimous recommendation of the United Kingdom’s chief medical officers is to make a universal offer of one dose of the Pfizer vaccine to the 12 to 15 year-old age group, with further JCVI guidance needed before any decision on a second dose. They have been clear that they are making this recommendation on the basis of the benefits to children alone, and not on the benefits to adults or wider society. I can confirm that the Government have accepted the recommendation. We will now move with the same sense of urgency that we have had at every point in our vaccination programme.
As the chief medical officers reminded us today, whatever decision teenagers and parents take, they must be supported and not stigmatised in any way. We must continue to respect individual choice. As a father, the decisions that I take on behalf of my own children give me extra pause for thought. People who would not think twice about getting the jab for themselves will naturally have more questions when it comes to vaccinating their children. I completely understand that, but to those who remain undecided I want to say this: the MHRA is the best medical regulator in the world, and it has rigorously reviewed the safety of our vaccines and concluded that they are safe for 12 to 15 year-olds. We continue to have a comprehensive safety surveillance strategy in place across all age groups to monitor the safety of all the Covid-19 vaccines that are approved for use in the United Kingdom.
It is important to remember that our teenagers have shown great public spirit at every point during this pandemic. They have stuck to the rules so that lives could be saved and people kept safe, and they have been some of the most enthusiastic proponents of vaccines. That is at least in part because they have experienced the damage that comes with outbreaks of Covid-19. More than half of 16 and 17 year-olds across the United Kingdom have had the jab since becoming eligible just last month.
At every point in our vaccination programme, we have been guided by the best clinical advice. The advice that we have received from the four chief medical officers today sets out their view that 12 to 15 year-olds will benefit from vaccination against Covid-19. We will follow that advice and continue on that vital path, which is making more and more people in this country safe. I commend this Statement to the House.”
The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Tuesday 14 September.
“With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a Statement on the pandemic and our autumn and winter plan to manage the risk of Covid-19.
Over the past few months, we have been making progress down the road to recovery, carefully and cautiously moving closer to normal life. As we do this, we have been working hard to strengthen our defences against this deadly virus. We have been continuing the roll-out of our vaccination programme, with 81% of people over the age of 16 having had the protection of both doses. We have expanded our testing capacity yet further, opening a new mega-lab in Leamington Spa, and we have continued supporting research into long Covid, taking our total investment to £50 million.
Thanks to that determined effort, we have made some major steps forward. The link between cases, hospitalisations and death has weakened significantly since the start of the pandemic and deaths from Covid-19 have been mercifully low compared with previous waves. None the less, we must be vigilant as autumn and winter are favourable conditions for Covid-19 and other seasonal viruses. Children have returned to school. More and more people are returning to work. The changing weather means that there will be more people spending time indoors, and there is likely to be a lot of non-Covid demand on the NHS, including flu and norovirus.
Today, keeping our commitment to this House, I would like to provide an update on our review of preparedness for autumn and winter. The plan shows how we will give this nation the best possible chance of living with Covid without the need for stringent social and economic restrictions.
There are five pillars to this plan. The first is further strengthening our pharmaceutical defences such as vaccines. The latest statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that almost 99% of Covid-19 deaths in the first half of this year were people who had not received both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine. This shows the importance of our vaccination programme, and, by extending the programme further, we can protect even more people. Almost 6 million people over the age of 16 remain unvaccinated in the UK, and the more people there are who are unvaccinated the larger the holes in our collective defences. We will renew our efforts to maximise uptake among those who are eligible but who have not yet, for whatever reason, taken up the offer.
Next, we have been planning our booster doses, too. As with many other vaccines, there is evidence that the protection offered by Covid-19 vaccines reduces over time, particularly for older people who are at greater risk. Booster doses are an important way of keeping the virus under control for the long term.
This morning, we published the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation on a booster programme. It recommended that people who were vaccinated in phase 1—priority groups 1 to 9 —should be offered a booster vaccine; that this vaccine should be offered no earlier than six months after the completion of the primary vaccine course; and that, as far as possible, the booster programme should be deployed in the same order as phase 1. I can confirm that I have accepted the JCVI’s advice and that the NHS is preparing to offer booster doses from next week. The NHS will contact people at the right time and nobody needs to come forward at this point. This booster programme will protect the most vulnerable through the winter months and strengthen our wall of defence even further.
As well as that, we will be extending the offer of a Covid-19 vaccine to even more people, as the Minister for Covid-19 vaccine deployment announced yesterday in the House—thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing him to make that statement yesterday. All young people aged 16 to 17 in England have already been offered a dose of a Covid-19 vaccine to give them the protection as they return to school. Yesterday, the UK’s chief medical officers unanimously recommended making a universal offer of a first dose of a vaccine to people between the ages of 12 and 15. The Government have accepted that recommendation, too, and will move with urgency to put this into action. We are also seeing great advances in the use of antivirals and therapeutics. Several Covid-19 treatments are already available through the NHS and our antivirals taskforce is leading the search for breakthroughs in antivirals, which have so much more potential to offer.