Teenage jab clinics will open to deter anti-vax protests at schools

COVID vaccine walk-in centres for teenagers are to open within weeks in an effort to keep anti-vaxxers away from school gates.

It has been reported that Government ministers are planning to start the scheme for 12 to 15-year-olds in the coming days or weeks.

Sources claim that the clinics are an attempt to keep anti-vaxxers away from the school gates, the Mail on Sunday reported.

This comes amid concern that the Government has been too slow in rolling out the vaccination programme in schools, as the newspaper reported that almost half of new Covid cases in England are among the under-20s.

When schools went back early last month, 33 per cent of new coronavirus cases were in that age group. However, by the second week of this month, the proportion had grown to 46 per cent. Because cases have been rising, in absolute terms the number of new infections in under-20s is not far off having doubled since early September, rising from about 9,000 to almost 15,500 a day.

Dr David Strain, an hospital consultant who led a recent Exeter University study looking at how jabbing teenagers could help protect others, said the increase was “really quite scary” and showed the teen vaccination campaign needed to be sped up.

If it was not, he warned that older relatives of infected children would die needlessly of Covid. Just 15 per cent of 12 to 15-year-olds in England are now vaccinated, up from 11.5 per cent a week ago.

Dr Strain said teenagers acted as a “viral reservoir”. While they rarely became seriously ill with Covid, they inevitably spread it to older family members.

He added: “In our study, we anticipated six weeks or so of infections rising in children and adolescents after they started mixing. Then there would be an uptick of cases in over-65s.

“If you look at the past couple of weeks’ worth of data, that’s what’s starting to happen. Our next concern is that this [spread to older age groups] is going to cause hospitalisations to rise.”

Although 94 per cent of over-50s are double-jabbed, Dr Strain said this left significant numbers unprotected, while there were “hints of waning immunity” in the already vaccinated, hence the need for the booster campaign.