Only vulnerable eligible for Covid jab in UK rollout for 5- to 11-year-olds

Only five- to 11-year-olds who are vulnerable will be eligible for the BioNTech/Pfizer Covid jab in the UK, following advice from the government’s vaccine advisers, despite the medicines regulator approving the shot for all children in the age group.

The Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency on Wednesday granted regulatory approval for the Pfizer shot to be used in smaller doses for five- to 11-year-olds. The doses are a third of the size of jabs for those aged 12 and over.

But the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, the UK’s vaccine advisory group, opted to roll out the jab only to vulnerable five- to 11-year-olds and those with vulnerable relatives in their household. This would cover 330,000 children, according to official estimates.

Separately, the JCVI said booster shots could be rolled out to healthy 16 and 17-year-olds, alongside children aged 12 to 15 with weakened immune systems or those living with vulnerable people. They would become eligible for their third dose three months after the second dose, the committee added.

The government will make the final decision but it usually follows the JCVI advice.

The decision to restrict the rollout to vulnerable five- to 11-year-olds comes despite soaring infection rates driven by the Omicron variant and several other major nations having opted for universal vaccination for that age group. An average of nearly 100 daily cases per 100,000 were recorded among under-10s across England in the week to December 21, a similar level to when a surge of infections caused mass school absences in June.

The JCVI said two shots, administered eight weeks apart, would be offered to five- to 11-year-olds “who are in a clinical risk group or who are a household contact of someone (of any age) who is immunosuppressed”.

“The majority of children aged five-to-11 are at very low risk of serious illness due to Covid-19,” explained Professor Wei Shen Lim, Covid-19 chair for the JCVI. “However, some five- to 11-year-olds have underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk, and we advise these children to be vaccinated in the first instance.”

A person close to the committee told the Financial Times that a decision on a wider rollout for all five- to 11-year-olds “would be for next year”.

Dr June Raine, MHRA chief executive, said the body had concluded the shot was “safe and effective” for use in younger children. “We have carefully considered all the available data and reached the decision that there is robust evidence to support a positive benefit risk for children in this age group,” she said.

Raine added that the MHRA had “liaised closely” with other regulators, adding that real-world data from countries where the Pfizer jab was already available to five- to 11-year-olds “demonstrate a favourable safety profile compared with that seen in other age groups”.

The UK regulator has taken longer to approve the shot for five- to 11-year-olds than most other major nations. Regulators in the US, EU, Israel, Canada and Australia all approved the reduced dose vaccine in November.

Similarly, the JCVI has marked itself as an outlier by restricting the vaccine rollout to vulnerable five- to 11-year-olds. In the US, where all younger children can get the jab, 6.1m five- to 11-year-olds — around a fifth of the total — have already received at least one dose.

Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University in London, said: “It makes no sense that the UK is once again enacting exceptional policies that do not offer protection to children.

“I cannot understand why a committee that seems so cautious about potentially rare side effects of vaccination that don’t seem to have materialised in any concerning way after 7m doses have been given out in the US,” she added

The JCVI also lagged other countries’ vaccine advisory groups over the decision to offer jabs to older children. In September, the committee took the unprecedented step of passing the decision on to the UK’s four chief medical officers.

The committee only signed off on second doses for 12- to 17-year-olds in early December after anxiety began to mount over the Omicron variant.