Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of excluding (a) household members and (b) carers from eligibility for covid-19 vaccinations on clinically extremely vulnerable people.

The Government is committed to protecting those most vulnerable to COVID-19 through vaccination, as guided by the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). The primary aim of the national COVID-19 vaccination programme remains the prevention of serious illness, involving hospitalisations and deaths, arising from COVID-19.

In its advice for autumn 2024, the JCVI advised that in the era of highly transmissible Omicron sub-variants, any protection offered by the vaccine against transmission of infection from one person to another is expected to be extremely limited. Therefore, the indirect benefits of vaccination, namely vaccinating an individual such as a carer or household member to reduce the risk of severe disease in other people, are less evident now compared with previous years. Accordingly, in line with JCVI advice, carers were not eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination in autumn 2024.

In line with the JCVI advice, the autumn 2025 programme is focused on targeted vaccination of the oldest adults, namely those aged 75 years old and over, residents in care homes for older adults, and individuals who are immunosuppressed. These are the groups who continue to be at higher risk of serious disease, including mortality. Any carer or household member who is eligible for vaccination through age or immunosuppression is encouraged to take up the offer of vaccination.