Health Secretary Matt Hancock has again rejected calls for teachers to be given priority in the vaccine queue before schools return.
He told Sky's Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “We’ve asked the expert group, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, what order we should vaccinate in, broadly in order to reduce the number of deaths as fast as possible.
“I think everybody can understand why we asked that as the question.
“They set out the priority groups one to nine, which includes those who are clinically most vulnerable and their carers, and includes the over-50s, going down the age range.
“They are currently considering, after that, what might be the best order in terms of clinical priority.
“There isn’t strong evidence that teachers are more likely to catch Covid than any other group, but I’ll leave it for the JCVI to set out what they think is the best order in which to do this that minimises the number of deaths.”
Ministers have previously talked about March 8 being the day that schools could begin to re-open. This is because the vaccines take three weeks to be effective, and March 8 is three weeks after February 15, the date by which the most vulnerable should all have had a vaccination.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to set out his roadmap for coming out of lockdown on Monday.
