Care home residents and their carers will be first in line to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the UK, it has been confirmed.
The government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has confirmed its priority list for the first phase of the UK’s mass vaccine rollout, which will begin early next week.
It comes after the UK became the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use.
The JCVI’s priority list for the first phase of the vaccine rollout is as follows:
1 – Residents in a care home for older adults and their carers
2 – All those 80 years of age and over. Frontline health and social care workers
3 – All those 75 years of age and over
4 – All those 70 years of age and over. Clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
5 – All those 65 years of age and over
6 – All individuals aged 16 years to 64 years with underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of serious disease and mortality
7 – All those 60 years of age and over
8 – All those 55 years of age and over
9 – All those 50 years of age and over
Dr June Raine, the chief executive of the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said the regulator used a rolling review to complete its assessment of the vaccine in the shortest time possible, with hundreds of experts poring over more than a thousand pages of data.
