14 | New Scientist | 11 December 2021FOR the first few months of
this year, the UK led most
other countries in vaccinating
as many people against covid-
as quickly as possible. But the
nation has been one of the
slowest high-income countries
to vaccinate teenagers. News
of the omicron variant of the
coronavirus prompted the UK to
recommend that 12 to 15-year-olds
can now have a second vaccine
dose three months after their first,
but 5 to 11-year-olds remain totally
unvaccinated. What is behind the
UK’s apparent reticence around
giving children jabs?
While the UK was a pioneer in its
efforts to vaccinate older adults –
it was the first high-income nation
to approve any covid-19 vaccine –
when it comes to children, it isbeing much slower. The country’s
Medicines and Healthcare
products Regulatory Agency
(MHRA) extended legal approval
for use of the Pfizer/BioNTech
jab to children aged 12 and over
in June, in line with many other
countries. Places such as the
US and Israel actually started
vaccinating this age group in
May and June, respectively.Estimating long covid
However, the UK body that decides
on vaccine deployment, the Joint
Committee on Vaccination and
Immunisation (JCVI), took until
September to conclude that
the benefits of the jab for healthy
12 to 15-year-olds “are marginally
greater than the potential
known harms... [but] the margin
of benefit... [is] too small to
support advice on a universalCovid-MATT
HE
W^
HORWOOD/GET
TYIM
AGESUK lags on child vaccinations
As concerns over long covid and the omicron variant grow, why has the UK
been relatively slow to vaccinate young people? Clare Wilson reportsChildren at a school in
Cardiff, UK, in September“ 12 to 15-year-olds can
now have a second dose,
but 5 to 11-year-olds
are totally unvaccinated”
programme of vaccination”.
The JCVI said the benefits
of vaccination are smaller for
children because they are less
likely to get seriously ill from
covid-19 and the jab carries
the risk of the rare side effect
of myocarditis, or heart
inflammation. Regarding long
covid, something that worries
many parents, the committee
said in August that estimates
of symptoms lasting more than
eight weeks in children ranged
from less than 1 per cent to 10 per
cent of cases – with more rigorous
studies “generally reporting rates
at the lower end of this range”.
There has certainly been a
wide range of estimates for the
prevalence of long covid, partly
because there is no widely agreed
definition of it: while the coresymptoms include problems such
as fatigue and headaches, one
study linked the condition with
more than 200 symptoms. “The
problem is long covid has not been
defined in children,” says Michael
Absoud at King’s College London.
Initial research also tended
to overstate the condition’s
prevalence by failing to use a
comparator group of children
who had never caught covid-19,
because it is common for
teenagers to report symptoms
such as fatigue, for instance. In
August, a study in England that
did use a non-infected comparison
group found that 30 per cent of
11 to 17-year-olds who had covid-
reported three or more symptoms
three months later, compared with
16 per cent of those who hadn’t
been infected. This translates toA vial of the Pfizer/
BioNTech vaccineNews Insight
DAVIDZALUBOWSKI/AP/SHUTT
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ST
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