It’s vital the young get vaccinated in fight to save lives
WE have been bombarded with statistics during the Covid pandemic, not all of them very enlightening. But just occasionally up pops a figure which makes things very clear. One of them was the revelation by Amanda Pritchard, the new chief executive of the NHS, that one in five people in hospital with Covid is aged between 18 and 34. During the peak of Covid in January it was more like one in 20.
There is no need to exaggerate the threat. Covid remains a disease which is far less deadly to the young than it is to the old.The overall number of 18 to 34 year olds in hospital is around 1,000 – which in a country of 67 million is still a mercifully small number.
But what the figures tell us is how well that vaccines are doing at keeping older age groups out of hospital. The relative number of young people in hospital has increased because there is a huge disparity between the vaccination rate between age groups. Among the over-55s, according to ONS figures, the proportion of people who have received a double dose of vaccine is now well over 95 per cent. Among 75 to 79 year olds it is virtually 100 per cent.
AMONG 18 to 24 year olds, by contrast, only 62.2 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women have had one dose of vaccine. Among 30 to 34 year olds, only 34.4 per cent of men and 46.3 per cent of women have had both doses.
Back in January the UK got off to the flying start thanks to the early approval of vaccines and an inspired procurement policy which gave the NHS access to vaccines before many other countries.
But the gap has closed considerably in recent weeks thanks to the failure of young people to come forward. We look like stalling perhaps a little below the vaccination rate which we would need to achieve muchprized herd immunity.
The Government’s efforts to persuade young people to get vaccinated have so far missed the mark. The announcement that vaccine passports will be required to enter nightclubs and football stadiums from September, as well as ministers’ suggestion that workplaces should refuse to employ people who are not fully-vaccinated, looks too much like a policy of compulsory vaccination.
It is very important that we don’t go down that route, partly because of the iniquity of it and partly because it would very likely prove counter-productive. Where would compulsory vaccination leave, for example, people who for medical reasons have not had the jab?
Much has been made of the anti-vaxxer movement which opposes all kinds of vaccine, but its reach in Britain is tiny.
According to a survey by the ONS only nine per cent of those who reported themselves to be “vaccine-hesitant” had an objection to vaccines in general.
The majority were worried, not unreasonably, about potential side-effects and long-term health effects from Covid vaccines developed at record speed. It is right to be cautious.
THE AstraZeneca vaccine, for example, has turned out to have a rare side-effect which has, according to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Products Agency, so far killed 71 people in Britain, many of them relatively young.
That risk has to be weighed against the risk of dying or suffering serious illness from Covid. But it shouldn’t be
dismissed. All that achieves is to encourage the anti-vaxxers. If the Government wants to maximise the uptake of vaccines it must be open and honest about the balance of risks.
We should encourage young people to look, for example, at the numbers of people in their age group who have been unfortunate enough to contract a serious case of the disease and impress upon them that they really could end up suffering like that themselves.
Even if you don’t suffer serious illness yourself, you need to ask yourself to whom you could pass on the infection?
Second, the NHS should be addressing legitimate concerns about side-effects by offering a choice of vaccines.
It is not surprising that many young people are blasé about vaccines given that their generation has not had to grow up with the risk of infectious diseases. The Prime Minister should list the infectious diseases which used to kill large numbers of people in Britain but which, thanks to vaccines, have all but disappeared.
Here is just a few for starters: smallpox, tuberculosis, diptheria, polio, tetanus. If you haven’t been vaccinated yet, google them – and reflect how best you could help to add Covid to that list.
‘The Government needs to be open about the balance of risks’