Now 12-15 year olds to get walk-in jab clinics

Ministers plan to beat anti-vaxxers at school gates

WALK-IN vaccine clinics for schoolchildren will be unveiled within weeks in an effort to speed up the jabs rollout.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Ministers are planning to launch the scheme for 12-to15-year-olds shortly.

It comes amid concern that the Government has been far too slow in rolling out the vaccination programme in schools.

Sources also claim the new clinics are an attempt to keep anti-vaxxers away from the school gates.

Last night, there were fresh calls to speed up the vaccination of teenagers after an analysis of official figures by The Mail on Sunday found almost half of new Covid cases in England are now in the under-20s.

When schools went back early last month, 33 per cent of new cases were in that age group.

But by the second week of this month, the proportion had grown to 46 per cent. Teenagers now make up the lion’s share of infections in the under-20s.

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. Hospital consultant Dr David Strain, 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 ramped up rapidly.

If it was not, he warned, 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’ – that 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.

He said nobody wanted to see children grow up with the guilt of passing Covid on to a family member who got seriously ill.

‘But children at that age are smart enough to know they brought the virus home from school, and then parents or grandparents got sick,’ he added.

According to data released yesterday, more than 3.3million booster jabs have been administered in

England. Across the UK, 49.4million people have had their first Covid jab – the equivalent of 85.9 per cent of the over-12s. More than 45.3million have had two doses.

Some 43,423 daily cases of Covid were recorded yesterday, up by 12.8 per cent over seven days, and there were 148 deaths within 28 days of a positive test – a 5.4 per cent rise in a week.

Care home providers however have raised concerns that the rollout of booster jabs to staff has been

‘Staff don’t want to have to do three jabs a year’

too slow. One provider said employees who happily took the first two jabs are refusing the top-up one.

They said one reason is because staff ‘don’t want to have to do three to four jabs a year’ but added that the nature of the rollout is also not driving demand.

‘Care homes are not as involved in encouraging staff because it is not compulsory,’ they said. ‘They are just sending the link [to staff] to sign up.’

The Department of Health last night declined to release figures on how many care home staff had taken up the booster jab.