A leading government adviser has called for children under 12 to be vaccinated to prevent a winter wave of coronavirus that could see fatally ill patients turned away from Scottish hospitals.
Devi Sridhar, who holds the chair of global public health at Edinburgh University, said the only alternative to child vaccination would be to impose tough restrictions on society again.
Sridhar, who sits on Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid-19 advisory group, said another full lockdown was unlikely but that Scotland’s vaccine passport scheme may be extended from the present limited use in nightclubs and stadiums, to wider use in restaurants, bars and gyms.
The public health expert said colleagues in Edinburgh hospitals were very worried about the impact another wave of coronavirus would have on the NHS.
She warned that “people will basically be turned away who need care and we will have deaths that could have been prevented if they had seen a doctor or medical professional”.
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Sridhar called on the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises ministers on vaccine programmes, to follow the example of the United States and begin vaccinating children aged 5 to 11.
She acknowledged that there was a small risk of side effects from the vaccine but said US medical regulators had ruled “the benefits outweigh the risks”.
Sridhar told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland: “This is led by the US paediatric community who are concerned about Covid in children given it was a top-eight cause of child death last year. The challenge in Scotland is the decision lies with the JCVI down south so all eyes will be on them.
“Are they looking at the same evidence as the US and are they going to be moving as quickly, or will they wait and watch like they did with the 12 to 16s and we are now several months behind other countries?”
She stressed that vaccination was voluntary and no child would be forced to get jabbed, but said colleagues in the public health community in the US were queuing up to get their children vaccinated.
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Sridhar said: “Look at the experts and what they are doing with their children. They are going quickly to get them vaccinated and protected against Covid-19. This is not for the wider benefit of society, it is for the benefit to the child because while we know in some kids it is asymptomatic, in other kids it can be quite a serious infection.”
Vaccinating under-12s would also protect elderly people, who are most at risk of dying from coronavirus, as it would cut transmission in the community which is presently largely driven by unvaccinated children.
Sridhar said: “A vaccine is like an umbrella. If it is raining lightly it is going to protect you quite well but if it is pouring your are still going to get wet. That is how we need to think about the level of virus in our communities.
“Places like Portugal, which has 98 per cent of people over age 12 fully vaccinated, are lifting restrictions and not seeing an uptick in cases.
“We only need to look at places like Wales or Latvia which are looking at bringing back pretty strict restrictions, almost lockdown-like, because of rising cases.”
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Humza Yousaf, the health secretary, said on Tuesday that he would not hesitate to reimpose economic and social restrictions if coronavirus threatened to overwhelm the NHS.
Sridhar said: “We know that hospital capacity was quite limited already in previous winters and now we have Covid on top of it.
“The message I am getting from colleagues at Edinburgh University, who work in the hospitals in Edinburgh and are usually pretty balanced and considered, is that this is pretty worrying.
“All of us have to work together… to make sure our hospitals don’t collapse.”
Sridhar said the Cop26 conference in Glasgow was taking place “in the worst timing ever during the pandemic” but acknowledged there was an “existential threat to humanity” from climate change that needed urgent political attention.
