To further extend the audience of vaccinated people - including very young people - to avoid even the hypothesis of a new national lockdown across the Channel.
Boris Johnson outlines anti-Covid plans for autumn and winter in a country where the vaccine has already reached 81% of over 16s with two doses (90% with one).
And it relies on the country's top medical authorities - the chief medical officers of the UK's 4 nations - to overturn the recommendation to exclude healthy children between 12 and 15 years old just a couple of weeks ago by other specialists. those of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (Jcvi).
The details of the British winter strategy against the pandemic are entrusted to a press conference scheduled for tomorrow in Downing Street, which Prime Minister Tory will hold alongside - as a shield - Professor Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Advisor of the Government, and above all Professor Chris Whitty, an internationally renowned virologist and chief medical officer of England. But the views of Whitty and her counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the green light for mass administration of a single vaccine dose under the age of 16 has already been formalized today. And it opens the door to an overcoming of the reservations of the JCVI: which, although without questioning the efficacy and overall safety of the approved antidotes, had chosen not to recommend them at the moment.use among 12-15 year olds - if not immunosuppressed or struggling with previous chronic diseases - evoking an ad hoc margin of caution on the evaluation of the risk / benefit ratio in this specific age group.
"We are waiting to hear what the chief medical officers have to say: I think it is up to them to decide rather than to the politicians", BoJo glissed in the morning, pressed by journalists in postponing the other details until tomorrow. The response, however, is now public in its essential points: with the ok limited for the moment to a single dose for the youngest and justified by the belief that greater immune coverage can make the school environment safer after the general reopening of the classrooms of the Kingdom in the past few weeks.
"What we want is to do everything possible to protect the country," the premier cut short on the sidelines of a visit to Leicester. A goal that the Tory government aims to achieve by betting almost everything at this stage on a further leap forward in the vaccination campaign in order not to re-propose the specter of the lockdown; to set aside or at least postpone the imposition of the Green pass for access to public places or collective events; and not to reinstate any of the restrictions lifted in July for now. Except for reserving oneself, in the event of a new winter surge of infections (settled in September around 30,000 a day on the island, albeit with fewer hospitalizations and much fewer deaths than the previous waves),to be able to reintroduce in crowded public places or on urban transport the constraint of masks (in England no longer compulsory anywhere from 19 July) or the indication of wide-ranging work from home.
Johnson has meanwhile confirmed that the initiation of the administration of a third vaccination booster starting this month for the vulnerable and the elderly will go ahead "according to approved programs". While he insisted on appealing to the remaining 10% of British adults who have not yet received the first dose to come forward, since "unfortunately there are still people dying from Covid": almost all, he warned, "not vaccinated".