The NHS are treating this as a vaccination campaign, posting out appointments that haven’t been requested. I feel this approach is at odds with the JCVI advice. Let’s look at a few parts of the JCVI statement:
- What was advised was a “non-urgent offer”, not a campaign.
- Interesting wording around what the intention is. Tempting to think the anticipated payoff is more to the overall transmission dynamic within the whole population, than to the individual children.
- This is further suggested by the admission that it would be a “one-off pandemic response programme” without any commitment to put it in the regular childhood immunisation programme (and “endemicity” acknowledges covid will be around indefinitely). It’s about flattening curves, or trying to. I’m not sure this has really been spelled out to parents.
-> Brutally honest, and should all be in the patient information leaflet.
-> Strongly suggesting it won’t be worth it to offer this vaccine once the pandemic phase is over and we no longer fear big waves.
After this statement was made, real-world data showed terrible efficacy against the new Omicron variant for this vaccine (down to 12% against symptomatic infection). I thought they would pull it, since the declared threshold for acceptance of any covid vaccine back in 2020 was 50%. But the campaign is underway anyway, and they have not communicated this new information to parents either.
The vaccine seems to be safe, and I don’t really care what other parents decide for their children. I just wish public health was more transparent and honest. I also think this is probably a massive waste of resource that could be better used on plenty of other things (for example, chicken pox vaccination).
Meaning and Truth 