As the scope of the UK’s Covid vaccination rollout creeped ominously from the original risk-based cohorts down to younger and healthier groups, controversy began to surround the question of vaccinating children.

This was despite assurances only months earlier by Vaccine Task Force chair Kate Bingham — repeated in Parliament by the UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock — that this was to be “an adult-only vaccine”.

The decision to roll out vaccines to children, bypassing advice to the contrary from the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), in a highly unusual move was made by the four UK Chief Medical Officers, including England’s Chris Whitty, and justified as being in order to “reduce education disruption”.

We challenged this in a joint campaign with MP Miriam Cates, insisting that any decision to vaccinate children must be based solely on the health benefits for those individual children. The campaign was covered by The Times.