Healthy adults under 30 should be offered an alternative vaccine to the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab if there is one available in their area and they are not at high risk of Covid, following concerns over rare blood clots, the UK government’s vaccination advisory body has said. The new advice was issued after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency published new figures showing that there have been 79 cases of extremely rare types of blood clotting incidents, including 19 deaths, following the use of 20m doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. (See 5.18pm.) Previously the MHRA said any link between these cases and the vaccine was unproven, but today it said the evidence for this was “stronger” than it had been before and that a connection was now “reasonably plausible”. At a news conference with the MHRA and the JCBI, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, presented figures showing that, for older people, the benefits of having the vaccine clearly outweighed the risks. (See 4.42pm.) But he went on: But you can see that at a very low exposure risk ... the risk-benefit is relatively finely balanced in those younger age groups. That is why the government is offering the under-30s the option of getting an alternative vaccine. Van-Tam said that some people might have to wait a bit longer for a jab, but that the overall effect on the vaccine rollout programme would be “negligible”. (See 3.48pm.) For weeks the UK authorities have been insisting that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe, and downplaying the reports linking it to rare blood clots that have led to some EU regulators restricting its use to older people, or suspending its use altogether. But the UK authorities are now taking a more precautionary approach than the European Medicines Agency, which announced its own AstraZeneca update at the same time as the MHRA and the JCVI. The EMA proposed that the rare blood clots would be listed formally as a side-effect of the vaccine, but it did not propose any restrictions on its use. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has announced that more than one adult in 10 in the UK has now had both doses of vaccine.
Almost one in 14 people aged 16 or over in Great Britain say they are lonely, up 40% since last spring, according to the Office for National Statistics. A comedy club has said it suffered “significant damage” to its reputation after being wrongly linked to the government’s proposal for coronavirus health certificates. Northern Ireland’s justice minister has said the government’s “dishonesty” over the consequences of hard Brexit has contributed to the anger felt by loyalists, as police counted the cost of 41 officers injured during violence on the streets over four nights. Alex Salmond has been accused of being an apologist for Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime after he refused to say whether Moscow was to blame for the Salisbury poisonings in 2018. That’s all from me for today. But our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.