Health Services and Social Services: Vaccination
(asked on 27th June 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of making frontline health and social care workers eligible for the autumn 2025 covid-19 vaccination programme.
The Government is committed to protecting those most vulnerable to COVID-19 through vaccination as guided by the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). On 13 November 2024, the JCVI published advice on the COVID-19 vaccination programme for spring 2025, autumn 2025, and spring 2026. This advice is available at the following link:
On 26 June 2025, the Government accepted the JCVI’s advice that for autumn 2025, a COVID-19 vaccination should be offered to adults aged 75 years old and over, residents in care homes for older adults, and the immunosuppressed aged six months old and over.
In line with JCVI’s advice, frontline health and social care workers (HSCWs) and staff working in care homes for older adults will not be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination under the national programme for autumn 2025. This is following an extensive review by the JCVI of the scientific evidence surrounding the impact of vaccination on the transmission of the virus from HSCWs to patients, protection of HSCWs against symptoms of the disease, and staff sickness absences.
In the current era of high population immunity to COVID-19, additional COVID-19 doses provide very limited, if any, protection against infection and any subsequent onward transmission of infection. For HSCWs, this means that COVID-19 vaccination likely now has only a very limited impact on reducing staff sickness absence. Therefore, the focus of the programme is now on those at greatest risk of serious disease and who are therefore most likely to benefit from vaccination.
HSCWs who are otherwise eligible, for example because of their own health conditions, will continue to be offered the vaccine as part of the National Health Service programme.