Honours for key UK figures in vaccine drive; MPs say Covid passports are discriminatory and should be scrapped
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8.40am BST
China administered 18.2m doses of Covid vaccines on Friday, bringing the total number of jabs to 863.51m according to the National Health Commission, Reuters reports.
8.38am BST
Unsurprisingly the potential four-week delay to the next relaxation of restrictions in England is leading the morning discussions on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London and a member of the government’s Nervtag group, says he believes it will be necessary to vaccinate children as the new Delta variant, first identified in India, is more transmissible among children than the original strain of Covid-19.
With these more transmissible variants it is evident that they are being transmitted more among young adults and school children and even younger children, and that seems to perhaps be a change in biological quality of the infection. It’s not causing very high diseases rates among those kids, but it does strengthen that argument on vaccination.
I think on balance I am coming to the view that vaccination of children, there’s strong arguments to show we should be going there.
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