Petition signed by 600,000 still not enough for meningitis jab

A PETITION signed by almost 600,000 people calling for the meningitis B vaccine to be given to all under-11s should be ignored, as such decisions should be based on science, the chairman of the Commons health committee said yesterday.

The petition is the biggest in parliamentary history, but Sarah Wollaston, a doctor, told BBC Radio 4: “This is a very serious condition but if we’re to run vaccination policy purely on the size of a petition then we would run ourselves into very difficult territory.”

However, she did say that there was a case to review the formula used to determine the cost effectiveness of such vaccines, and that could happen soon.

The meningitis B vaccine, called Bexsero, is only available on the NHS for babies born on or after July 1, 2015. When the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) gave the green light for the vaccine to be rolled out to babies under the age of one, it concluded that it would not be cost effective to broaden it to children under five.

Prof Andrew Pollard, an Oxford University paediatrician and chairman of the JCVI, said: “We have to work within the rules. Even for babies, [the meningitis B vaccine] was fairly borderline in terms of cost effectiveness, and for older children the disease becomes so rare the NHS may be better treating children with cancer, for example.”

The online campaign to broaden the vaccination programme was prompted by the highly publicised case of twoyear-old Faye Burdett, who was killed by the disease on Valentine’s Day.

Faye’s parents, Jenny and Neil, from Maidstone, Kent, who released a harrowing picture of their daughter taken days before she died, said the petition response had been “overwhelming”.