A vaccine expert has said there is no need to vaccinate the UK's children against coronavirus as they are not very infectious.
Professor Adam Finn said the majority of transmission comes from the adult population so the although it hasn't been decided either way, children are unlikely to need the jab.
Prof Finn who is on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that giving youngsters the jab hasn't been ruled out.
He said: "It's undecided at this point. I don't think it's been ruled out, but I do think that we're clear that the main priority at the moment is to try and immunise as many people as possible who are at risk of getting really sick with this virus, because that's the one thing we want to avoid is another big surge of hospitalisations and deaths.
"That isn't going to happen in children because fortunately one of the few good things about this pandemic is children are very rarely seriously affected by this infection."
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Asked about children spreading the virus, he said: "Well actually the evidence we've got with children, particularly young children, is that they are not very infectious to each other or to adults around them, and that the majority of the transmission of the infection is in the adult population in fact.
"Because we've immunised so many older adults, that's now tending to be in younger adults, and there is a certain amount of transmission going on in secondary school so in teenagers, but in fact we've been surprised about how little transmission we've picked up in schools and of course this time around, there's been a lot more testing and awareness of what's going on in schools."
During the radio interview Professor Finn was also asked about the ethics of vaccinating young people in the UK when adults are dying abroad.
He replied: "Well there is the global perspective but even if we just look at it as a domestic issue, I think in normal times, just as in pandemic times, we simply wouldn't want to immunise anybody without needing to.
"It's an invasive thing to do, it costs money and it causes a certain amount of discomfort, and vaccines have side-effects, so if we can control this virus without immunising children we shouldn't immunise children as a matter of principle."
He added he was "optimistic that we are, in particularly in the UK with the high coverage we're achieving, and the extremely effective vaccines we've got, that we can achieve population immunity, and I'm afraid it's an open question as to whether we need to immunise any children at all.
"And if we do, how many children we need to immunise."
