Black people could get first vaccines due to increased risk

BLACK and Asian people could be prioritised for vaccination after analysis showed they were far more likely to be infected with coronavirus.

Researchers at Leicester University said they believed the joint committee on vaccination and i mmunisation would re-examine its priority list after analysis showed black people were twice as likely to be infected with the disease than white people.

The review also found that Asian people had a 1.5 times higher risk.

Vaccine priority is currently stratified largely based on age, with older adults in care homes and care home workers getting first access, followed by over-80s and healthcare workers.

But Dr Daniel Pan, a specialist registrar in infectious diseases at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, a lead author of the paper, said: “We feel very confident in our findings. I’ve not seen anything come out of the committee to examine this, but given this work, I suspect they will want to come back and look at it again.”

Researchers pooled data from 50 recent studies involving more than 18 million people in Britain and the US. Although they found that the risk of infection was higher, the chances of dying from Covid was largely similar between ethnicities.

It is not yet known whether underlying social issues are to blame for the disparities, such as larger households and more public-facing jobs, or if the disparity is genetic.

The researchers said some previous studies had failed to take into account the extra risk of infection when assessing the impact of Covid-19 on different ethnicities, making it appear that some groups were at more risk of dying once infected. The findings were published in by