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HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Click here for the latest.
Gender disregarded in proposed Covid vaccine roll-out
05/10/20 .
News
Gender will not be considered when it comes to providing a Covid vaccine.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises UK health departments on immunisation, has updated its 'interim advice' on how any vaccine for Covid-19 will be rolled out. Gender is totally disregarded. Beyond the understandable prioritisation of health care workers, targeting is almost entirely on the basis of age.
People will be offered the vaccine in the following order:
- older adults’ resident in a care home and care home workers
- all those 80 years of age and over and health and social care workers
- all those 75 years of age and over
- all those 70 years of age and over
- all those 65 years of age and over
- high-risk adults under 65 years of age
- moderate-risk adults under 65 years of age
- all those 60 years of age and over
- all those 55 years of age and over
- all those 50 years of age and over
- rest of the population
Will men be considered high or moderate risk adults? It appears not. Gender is not mentioned in the JCVI's section on 'risk groups' which focuses on ethnicity, deprivation and underlying conditions.
Indeed, the JCVI statement mentions men just once in its advice in the rather vague sentence: 'Male gender also appears to be associated with increased mortality from COVID-19.' The fact is that at any given age, men are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than women. We must hope that any vaccine campaign will specifically target men even if it does not prioritise them.
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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