Thread by @rwjdingwall

I am seeing a lot of tweets about vaccinating UK teenagers and advocates getting air time in places like @BBCNewsnight As a JCVI member, I am constrained in what I can say right now. However, two things are worth considering (1/8)

The risk/benefit for teenagers must be firmly established. The UK programme has already been modified because the risk/benefit of AZ was not clear for 20 and 30 somethings. Teenagers are at intrinsically low risk from Covid. Vaccines must be exceptionally safe to beat this (2/8)

Given the low risk of Covid for most teenagers, it is not immoral to think that they may be better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the *possible* risk of a vaccine. (3/8)

The pandemic will end through population immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection. A last wave of mild infections in unvaccinated younger people may well be what we are now seeing. The ONS serology data are more important than vaccine uptake in assessing this. (4/8)

It is well past time to panic about infection rates and to publish them obsessively. Even hospitalization rates are increasingly misleading as better therapy reduces length of stay. Covid is now a long way from being an important cause of mortality (5/8)

A reminder: medicine cannot deliver immortality and it is profoundly damaging to society to imply that it can, if only we try hard enough. We are all going to die one day - the question is when and how, not whether (6/8)

I am particularly concerned about the calls for Covid measures to continue to reduce all respiratory infections. As Rene Dubos noted 60 years ago, humans, viruses and bacteria form an ecosystem which has evolved over millennia. (7/8)

Surely we have enough experience of the unintended consequences of humans reshaping other ecosystems to suit their own ends not to rush into reshaping this one without really understanding what it would mean for human lives and immune systems (8/8)