Dr Mark Toshner

Don’t blame young people for plummeting vaccination rates

(Getty images)

There is a myth in football that you are always most susceptible to letting in a goal after you have just scored one. It’s probably not true but the idea is attractive. At the peak of our achievement we are vulnerable to complacency. Is a similar thing happening with the vaccine programme?

The current prevailing narrative is that the declining rates of vaccination are the fault of the under 30s. Government scientists accept that the country is ‘close to maximum take-up’, with many young people still hesitant about vaccination, the Times reported this week. But is that right?

There is probably some truth to the less-than-urgent demand amongst this lower-risk group. But focusing on uptake among young people alone obscures a more obvious issue. 

If you look at first and second doses in the UK you can see they have both had a precipitous decline; this is true of first doses in April, and second doses in June. As you would expect, the second dose decline is around 8-12 weeks after the first dose and we will come back to this later.

One of the justifications for delaying reopening last month was to enable more people to be vaccinated and receive second doses, because of rising Delta variant cases. A recent PHE study shows that this was a sensible move: two doses remain effective in preventing symptomatic infection at around a respectable (but slightly reduced) 75 per cent against this variant, which is now responsible for the vast majority of cases in Britain.

Why then are we not speeding through second doses? The last few months have surely demonstrated that we have spare capacity in our vaccination system and there are no reports of supply shortage. Instead it seems that Britain is in a situation where those waiting for their second dose face a patchy interpretation on the rules of when they should be eligible for that booster jab.

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