We are publishing a guest post today by Dr. Peter Hayes, a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sunderland, pointing out that when it comes to vaccinating healthy 12-15 year-olds the Government can no longer claim to be following the science.
“Follow The Science” has been the defining slogan of Covid policymaking for the past year and a half. However, we may now be at turning point. On September 3rd, that august and scientific body The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised not to start vaccinating otherwise healthy 12-15 year-olds. The Government, however, seems likely to set about vaccinating them anyway.
In his letter to chief medical officers, Health Secretary Sajid Javid says that the JCVI is against vaccination of 12-15 year olds because its margin of benefit against harm is “too small” and tacitly suggests that the officers come up with something to enable him to override this advice. However, Javid’s spin on the committee’s advice is misleading. It is not only the marginal benefits of the vaccine but also the unknown extent of its harms that has led the JCVI to recommend against it.
(1) The JCVI states that in advising whether or not to vaccinate it has focused on “the benefit to children and young people themselves, weighed against any potential harms from vaccination”, and that it has done this to the exclusion of other issues such as cost.
(2) It states that overall “the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms” [emphasis added].
If the benefits are greater, albeit only marginally, it might seem logical for the JCVI to approve of extending the vaccination program. The reason it does not is because of an important proviso. There is uncertainty, the JCVI says, about what the harms the vaccine might have in the medium to long term. There is, therefore, an asymmetry between our knowledge of the extent of the benefits of the vaccine and the extent of its harms. It is known perfectly well that the maximum benefit is small because even if it is assumed to protect every healthy child aged 12-15 from serious illness, very few become seriously ill anyway. The question of maximum harm is more open ended. In particular, the JCVI expresses concern over the very rare side effect of myocarditis. In the short term, the JCVI states, patients recover, but in the medium to longer term there is “the possibility of persistence of tissue damage resulting from inflammation”. Therefore, the JCVI argument is not simply that the marginal benefits are too small to recommend vaccination. It is that the benefits at best are small, and that while the known harms are marginally smaller, the unknowns might change this balance for the worse.
The JCVI also comments that while the effect of the vaccine on transition rates is uncertain, in its view any impact “may be relatively small”. This is significant when it comes to efforts to justify the vaccination of 12-15 year-olds on social and educational grounds. Although rather vague, such justifications implicitly assume a significant reduction in rates of transition.
The willingness of the JCVI to engage in critical scrutiny of the vaccination rollout has not been all that much in evidence in the past. No wonder the Government was unpleasantly surprised by its refusal to rubber stamp an extension to 12-15 year-olds. Perhaps the committee is heading out in a new direction. But more to the point, we are left with the question of the new direction taken by the Government.
If it is no longer following ‘the Science’, who is it following?
Stop Press: A senior panjandrum at the British Medical Association has said 12 year-olds should be able to overrule their parents to get a Covid vaccine because they’re “mature enough” – but admits jabbing teens will only cut infections by 20%.
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Good for him. Reform’s problem is Tice. The electorate suspects he’s a globalist in sheep’s clothing, and that manifested in the local elections.
Tice’s night time “olympian” partner Isabel Oakshott seriously dented any pretence of Reform’s anti-establishment stance when she wrote Handicock’s diaries.
Standing down 317 candidates in 2019 also added deeply to this suspicion.
Tice does indeed to pee or get off the pot.
With respect that seems to me like wishful thinking.
People who are naturally on the political right keep voting Tory in huge numbers. They have to stop for another political force to emerge on the right. They have had many chances and if the penny hasn’t dropped by now, I can’t see it happening in my lifetime. We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.
“We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.”
Oh, I think such a collapse is absolutely inevitable tof.
Looks that way
This has been going on for so long that there’s even a German word for it: Politikverdrossenheit (Fed-up-with-politics-ness). People are generally convinced that they keep getting shafted by corrupt/ otherwise non-desirable career politicians and have mentally disengaged themselves from political public life, yet, enough of them keep making the same crosses on the same boxes of ballot papers and then hope that this will somehow magically fix things (which it never does).
This is mirrored on the side of the actual political actors: By the time some group of people with a positive vision regarding what they want society to become and how to achieve that has percolated through the parliamentary system to positions of actual power, it’ll have turned into yet another group of short-termist establishment politicians playing to the tune of the machinery they believe to have conquered while it has really conquered them.
The system is f***ed and making more crosses on pieces of paper so that someone else will hopefully do something about it is not going to help.
Yep the system is indeed f…ed. ————-But as Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government…apart from all the rest”. ———We have to somehow operate within that f…ked system or become anarchists instead.
I’m not sure the electorate at large know what a globalist is.
Our area didn’t even have a candidate from Reform – I might have held my nose and voted for them, despite revising my opinion of them fundamentally.
I was born in London.
At age 1 I moved to Australia with my parents as a “10 pound Pom”.
I had a holiday there when I was 8, and another when I was 52, 9 years ago.
How times change!
As with San Francisco, Melbourne, New York and Seattle, Lefties certainly know how to destroy a decent city.
The fact that Khan looks set for another term says it all.
No desire to live there again.
if only those of the small government centre Right had one third of the commitment, energy and activism of those on the Left we may be in a better place.
We’re too busy working
I fully acknowledge that small c conservatives are busy but they are effective, practical hardworking people and that is why I considered that one third of the commitment, time and energy spent by the Left would be enough to turn the ship around.
Good point!
We also don’t like telling other people what to do or how to think.
Well done Howard Cox!
Just waiting for the Fake News to call him Hitler, anti-semitic, far right and an anti-vaxx science denier who wants to kill Gaia. They can dust off their 10 year old copies and regurgitate.
Too many people, too many cars, too many trains, too many planes, too many beggars, too many criminals, too many drugs, too many knives, too many guns, too many of almost everything you can think of…………..How can a total clutter like that be sorted out? Especially when boat loads of more clutter arrive in their thousands each week.
Time for a change. Sadiq has shown his incompetence and is destroying a once great city. Vote for the new guy or forever be ruled by the WEF.