Government advisers have greatly narrowed the groups who they recommend for Covid vaccine eligibility on the NHS next autumn.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said both the spring and autumn Covid vaccine campaigns in 2025 should be restricted to the over-75s, residents of a care home for older adults and those six months and over who are immunosuppressed.
This autumn, Covid vaccines are available for free for those aged 65 to 75 years and those who were previously deemed to be in a clinical risk group, however this will not be the case in neither spring nor autumn in 2025.
A smaller cohort had also been eligible in spring 2024.
Ministers have accepted the new JCVI recommendation for spring 2025 and are yet to decide on autumn.
The latest JCVI update also advised that it was highly unlikely that vaccination in pregnancy would be cost-effective, saying there had been no deaths in people who were pregnant in the past 18 months.
The committee said over the past four years, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 had been increasing ‘due to a combination of naturally acquired immunity following recovery from infection and vaccine-derived immunity’.
As Covid becomes an endemic disease, the JCVI has moved from a pandemic response to a standard assessment of cost effectiveness, it said.
Considering the impact on hospitalisation and death, the oldest adults and individuals who are immunosuppressed are the two groups who continue to be at higher risk of serious disease, the committee noted.
‘The advice is based on modelling of the impact and cost-effectiveness of vaccination where clinical outcomes are stratified by age, high-risk clinical disease groups and patients with immunosuppression,’ it said.
NHS figures show hospital admission rates were lower overall in 2023/24 than previous years, with flatter peaks of hospitalisations over longer time periods, continuing a declining trend seen since 2020.
A similar pattern was seen in intensive care and high dependency unit admission rates, it noted.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) this year decided that the national autumn vaccination offer would extend to all primary and community healthcare staff involved in direct patient care, despite not being recommended by the JCVI.
The eligible group is defined in the Green Book as ‘staff who have frequent face-to-face clinical contact with patients and who are directly involved in patient care in either secondary or primary care/community settings’.
This had caused confusion for GP practices because some said the advice had been inconsistent and not included in the Green Book.
Pulse has asked DHSC for clarity over whether front line NHS and social care staff will continue to be eligible through the general offer or though occupational health schemes.
Note: This article was updated on 12 December 2024 to reflect the news that the Government accepted the recommendation for spring 2025.
Bizarre : Firstly, Covid has only become ‘endemic’ since they encouraged it to spread by refusing to provide effective vaccinations or infection control measures.
Second, Measles, Mumps, Chickenpox, whooping cough, TB, Tetanus, were all endemic, and mostly still are, yet we are encouraged to vaccinate everyone against them.
Do JCVI still have the same understanding of the meaning of ‘endemic’ as medical science does?
Covid is still a serious disease that is still causing death and long-term disability and increased risk of other life-changing conditions, which is prventable by appropriate measures properly applied. And it is worse in the unvaccinated or incompletely protected parts of the population – and with racial inequality too!
Just because JCVI starts calling it names, like ‘endemic’ does NOT mean it will become less deadly or less serious.
You might as well try to treat an unvaccinated person for Tetanus infection simply by standing there shouting ‘you’re endemic’ at them, whilst they die in agony (I have seen a patient dying of Tetanus – it is really horrible).
COVID a minor illness in most people.
Who knew?
Unfortunately those fit, healthy, NHS staff who died, and thousands who have lost children, and children lost young parents, they did not know in time that they must shout ‘endemic’ at it to make it only a ‘minor illness’. And then there are hundreds of thousands disabled by long-covid and no longer able to work in NHS for a start.
Was only ever a serious illness in the minority and those have long since been protected by vaccination and the natural modification of the virulence of disease. We need to stop shoving the past into the now, no matter how bad the personal experience.