Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that parents and carers of clinically extremely vulnerable children receive clear information about how the needs of their children are being considered as part of the vaccination programme for covid-19.

At present, there is very limited data on vaccination in adolescents, with no data on vaccination in younger children. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation advises that only those children at very high risk of exposure and serious outcomes, such as older children with severe neuro-disabilities that require residential care, should be offered vaccination as part of phase one. The Green Book also sets out that children under 16 years of age, even if they are clinically extremely vulnerable, are at low risk of serious morbidity and mortality and given the absence of safety and efficacy data on the vaccine, are not recommended for vaccination.

Clinicians should discuss the risks and benefits of vaccination with a person with parental responsibility, who should be told about the paucity of safety data for the vaccine in children aged under 16 years old. However, the matter of whether to vaccinate a child should always be ultimately a decision to be made by the physician responsible for the patient.