13
Oct 2020
Warning that less than 50 per cent of UK population to receive coronavirus vaccine
The head of the government’s vaccine task force has said in an attempt to clarify the public’s ‘misguided’ perception of the programme’s aim, that less than half of the UK population can expect to be vaccinated against coronavirus.
Kate Bingham, chair of the UK vaccine task force, said the government was aiming to vaccinate around 30m people, compared with a population of around 67m, if a successful Covid-19 vaccine was found.
Ms Bingham said “People keep talking about ‘time to vaccinate the whole population’, but that is misguided. There’s going to be no vaccination of people under 18. It’s an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50, focusing on health workers, care home workers and the vulnerable.”
She added that the vaccination policy would be targeted at those “most at risk” and said that vaccinating healthy people, who are much less likely to develop severe outcomes from the virus, “could cause them some freak harm”, and possibly tipping the scales in terms of the risk-benefit analysis.
David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation’s special envoy on Covid-19, said that addressing the crisis was “not going to be a case of everyone getting vaccinated.
He added “There will be a definite analysis of who is the priority for the vaccine, based on where they live, their occupation and their age bracket.
“We’re not fundamentally using the vaccine to create population immunity, we’re just changing the likelihood people will get harmed or hurt. It will be strategic.”
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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.
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