Coronavirus at the latest: British property prices are rising in double digits for the fifth month in a row


[ad_1]

Pressure is mounting on the UK vaccine advisory group to recommend second doses of Covid-19 vaccines to healthy teenagers after new research shows the benefits “clearly outweigh” the risks.

The analysis, published Thursday in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, found that any weekly case rate in 12- to 17-year-olds over 30 per 100,000 would tip the equation in favor of vaccination to prevent hospital admissions and long covid.

The number of cases has not yet fallen below this level this year and in mid-September was 680 per 100,000 among 10 to 19-year-olds.

The United Kingdom’s Joint Vaccination and Immunization Committee approved first doses of Covid-19 vaccines for 16- and 17-year-olds in early August but made approval of second doses questionable amid concerns over rare cases of severe heart inflammation.

The JCVI is due to meet on Thursday morning and said a decision on the second dose should be expected in the coming weeks.

However, the analysis, done by researchers from the Independent Sage scientific panel, found that even if the weekly case numbers dropped to 50 per 100,000, vaccines would still prevent 75 more hospitalizations than cases of myocarditis related to the vaccine.

If the weekly case numbers rose to 1,000 per 100,000, the analysis suggests that second doses for teenagers would prevent more than 4,400 hospital stays.

Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University in London who led the analysis, said the results showed that full vaccination was “justified” for all 12 to 17 year olds in England.

Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London and a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, said the Delta variant “increased the stakes,” meaning that a single dose “almost certainly doesn’t even adequate protection “provides for teenagers”.

Maggie Wearmouth, a JCVI member and general practitioner, told the FT the committee needed “really, really good evidence” before it could approve second doses for healthy teenagers.

“We needed to have very robust data that absolutely convinced us that it would benefit both them and the rest of the population,” she said.

[ad_2]

About Nina Snider

Check Also

UK heads for recession as GDP falls 0.2% between July and September

B Britain’s ailing economy was headed for recession today, as the latest official data showed …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.