After the JCVI recommended against offering vaccines to children aged 12 to 15 on health grounds, the government asked the four chief medical officers to consider the broader case, including the impact on schooling.
As we know, the government has now accepted the chief medical officers’ recommendation: that all 12 to 15 year olds should be offered one dose of Pfizer on the grounds that doing so will reduce disruption to education. The government has released details of the modelling that underpins that rationale. The approach was first to estimate the number of infections with and without vaccination under different scenarios of infection spread. Next, they used this to model the number of days of lost education that could be prevented by vaccination.
Under a central scenario, the modelling paper estimates that vaccinating 60 per cent of 12 to 15-year-olds would prevent the loss of about 110,000 days of school in the six months between October and March 2022.
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