Reducing the availability of the NHS Covid vaccine endangers the lives of people at high clinical risk in particular and will result in more people suffering long-term illness and disability.

The Scottish Government is following Westminster in restricting NHS Covid vaccine access further than was the case in 2024, when access was already significantly restricted from 2022. Far fewer groups of people are now eligible for a Covid vaccine than the World Health Organisation recommends. Access is now more restricted than even in Trump’s USA, let alone in most of the rest of Europe. Unlike in autumn 2024, NHS vaccines are no longer available during pregnancy, to people at particularly high clinical risk (e.g. from heart disease, serious respiratory conditions or diabetes), not to health workers and care home staff. Covid boosters have never been offered to teachers. Only elderly people aged 75 and over and people meeting the criteria on grounds of being immunocompromised can now get them. For others, the only option is to pay up to £100.- each privately, and many don’t know about that option, even if they could afford it.

This is based on advice by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which the Scottish government is under no obligation to follow. JCVI advised drastic restrictions to vaccines based solely on very limited cost considerations, looking at acute hospitalisation and death only, not at Long Covid or other long-term damage from the virus, nor at or the resulting wider impact on public health, NHS Scotland’s capacity, on labour market inactivity, sickness absence from work or school, and other social and economic impacts.

This decision endangers the lives of people at high clinical risk in particular and will result in more people suffering long-term illness and disability.