RE: Front page of the Telegraph18 Jun 2021 11:52
Professor Sir Andrew Pollard opines without the facts.
From the DT: Professor suggests impact of virus on education could be reason for rolling out vaccine to children
Sarah KnaptonHarry de Quetteville
CORONAVIRUS testing in schools is hugely disruptive and should be suspended, experts have said, as it emerged that up to 60 per cent of “positive” tests a week are coming back negative when checked.
Under plans to keep schools open, more than 50?million lateral flow tests have been carried out on youngsters leading to thousands of pupils and their social bubbles being forced to self-isolate for 10 days.
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But analysis of Test and Trace data by The Daily Telegraph shows that in secondary schools, one third of lateral flow tests checked against the gold-standard Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test have come back negative. In one week in March, it rose to 60 per cent.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine programme, warned that mass testing was leading to such huge disruption in schools that it might be worth vaccinating youngsters in order to stop the chaos.
“If children are not severely affected, if they’re not major drivers of transmission, the testing itself is picking up lots of cases, causing classes to be sent home and so on,” he said.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we’re not impacting on education. And I think that impact on education could be a reason for vaccination.”
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is currently deciding whether to recommend jabs for children, amid fears the risk may outweigh the benefit.
Children and teenagers have been disproportionately hit by measures to control the pandemic despite being largely unaffected by the virus. Many have had exams cancelled, and have been forced to study away from their peers for months on end, putting their mental health and socialisation at risk. Yesterday, 23 British academics from universities including Oxford, Cambridge and University College London, wrote to Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, warning that lateral flow testing posed a danger for schools.
They are particularly concerned that contact tracing trials could spark a wave of new infections, and have called for them to be suspended.
Currently, 170 schools and colleges across England are taking part in the trials in which students no longer need to self-isolate when a close contact tests positive, if they themselves test negative using a lateral flow test.
But there have been concerns that as well as throwing up false positives, lateral flow devices miss large numbers of true positives. A pilot last year in Liverpool found they failed to spot positive cases around 50 per cent of the time.
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