Government advisers have greatly narrowed the groups who they recommend for Covid vaccine eligibility on the NHS next autumn.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said both the spring and autumn Covid vaccine campaigns in 2025 should be restricted to the over-75s, residents of a care home for older adults and those six months and over who are immunosuppressed.
This autumn, Covid vaccines are available for free for those aged 65 to 75 years and those who were previously deemed to be in a clinical risk group. However, this will not be the case in the spring or autumn of 2025.
A smaller cohort had also been eligible in spring 2024.
A final decision on who will be eligible will be taken by ministers.
The latest JCVI update also advised that it was highly unlikely that vaccination in pregnancy would be cost-effective, saying there had been no deaths in people who were pregnant in the past 18 months.
The committee said over the past four years, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 had been increasing ‘due to a combination of naturally acquired immunity following recovery from infection and vaccine-derived immunity’.
As Covid becomes an endemic disease, the JCVI has moved from a pandemic response to a standard assessment of cost effectiveness, it said.
Considering the impact on hospitalisation and death, the oldest adults and individuals who are immunosuppressed are the two groups who continue to be at higher risk of serious disease, the committee noted.
‘The advice is based on modelling of the impact and cost-effectiveness of vaccination where clinical outcomes are stratified by age, high-risk clinical disease groups and patients with immunosuppression,’ it said.
NHS figures show hospital admission rates were lower overall in 2023/24 than previous years, with flatter peaks of hospitalisations over longer time periods, continuing a declining trend seen since 2020.
A similar pattern was seen in intensive care and high dependency unit admission rates, it noted.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) this year decided that the national autumn vaccination offer would extend to all primary and community healthcare staff involved in direct patient care, despite not being recommended by the JCVI.
The eligible group is defined in the Green Book as ‘staff who have frequent face-to-face clinical contact with patients and who are directly involved in patient care in either secondary or primary care/community settings’.
This had caused confusion for GP practices because some said the advice had been inconsistent and not included in the Green Book.
The DHSC has been asked for clarity over whether front line NHS and social care staff will continue to be eligible through the general offer or though occupational health schemes.
A version of this story first appeared on our sister publication Pulse.
