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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Common Sense was looking out the window in March 2020 and seeing no pandemic.
What did the lovely Esther say then, I wonder?!
Don’t know be she gave the health fascist Hunt a second chance, so I don’t trust her judgement.
It’s all in the word ‘unless’.
Ms McVey might as well be a minister for gardening. She is pruning the woke undergrowth; raising the canopy of the woke forest; culling the surfeit of strange beasts that scurry in the woke wilderness. As long as whatever is woke ‘delivers’ ‘value’, floreat florebit.
As all gardeners will know, pruning makes a tree or shrub grow better; have a more attractive shape; produce more or fuller fruit.
When there has to be a minister for common sense it can be certain that all common sense has been lost. If you have freedom of speech, there’s no necessity for a minister of freedom of speech.
Has she got enough time to even start the job before Labour sweep back in a reinstate all the woke rubbish in spades.
This strikes me as more election window dressing.
The only way of cutting the state is with the blunt tool of spending cuts, e.g. 30% reduction in headcount. The minute you start trying to micromanage, the civil service starts running circles around you. Any serious conservative minister needs to view the civil service as the enemy and take actions to directly harm their interests.
I was hoping the headline read “‘Common Sense’ Minister to Scrap Civil Service”
30% reduction in headcount will mean the HR and EDI types will arrange for everyone doing anything actually productive to be fired to “cut costs”. McVey’s approach – to which degree it’ll work out remains to be seen – of identifying and than attacking actual problems is much more sensible.
won’t work. too slow
Mcvey, Mogg, Davis, Davies, Baker, Patel, Braverman, Davies, Badenoch, Jenrick, Redwood and others who position themselves on the Right of the a party have no influence whatsoever in the fake Tory party. But they have carved themselves a comfortable niche in the Party in playing to, and keeping onside the centre right vote. Hopefully this year the general public will see these actors for what they really are and they too are rejected in the GE.
The Conservative party has a serious credibility problem. Even if they go to the general election with a manifesto that takes an ultra hard line on immigration and wokery, they simply can’t be trusted.
They won’t even leave the ECHR – I mean, what is the benefit of being a member? The MPs just don’t want to upset their leftists friends. Leaving the ECHR should be the easiest decision in the world and they might even be able to get it without a vote.
At this stage, even Rishi personally machine gunning down the small boats won’t rescue the Tories.
As I watched the McVey Speech on GB news I switched over to SKY and BBC for a minute to see if they were showing it ——As I expected …No chance.
Lip service.
If they meant business they’d cut the funding for every DEI post in the public sector.
All they want is a few headlines.
Also what are they doing about Debanking, not a lot!
“Lip service”. Spot on!
Isn’t it amazing how the Fake Conservative Party is suddenly changing direction to please the voters before an election?
First we have Sunak the Smarmy raising the spectre of Nuclear War that he says only he is capable of preventing (???), so don’t vote for Kneeler.
Then we have Irish Maryolater McVey suddenly popping up to take action against the hated diversity, equality, inclusion rubbish in the civil service, after half a year in her post.
What next, I wonder? As Jon Mors said above, not even Sunak machine-gunning the dinghies will save the Tories now.
Another said,
“Representative democracy has failed in the UK.. Neither main party represent anything like the majority views in the UK.. Time for direct democracy through referendums held regularly on all matters.. Politicians should be just administrators of what the people decided. The most democratic country in the world has to be the Swiss and they have this as their system. Works very well and they never get involved in other countries wars.”
I think that is why Tommy Robinson is treated so harshly, because large swathes of British citizens agree with him.
I call it political poker ——-“I will go 50 million on stopping the boats” —–“I will see your 50 million and raise you another 40 million on tackling human traffickers”. ———“I will tackle the human traffickers and send the migrants back where they came from”——–“No you won’t because it is illegal”———“Well if it is illegal I will get rid of the court”——–and on and on and on