Sometimes, all you need is a single thread to pull. Before long, you reveal a large network of interests that sheds light on how our ideas about healthcare are shaped. A single article, posted to The Guardian on Wednesday the 3rd of April, is one such thread. In the end, I found enough eye-catching stuff that I’ll be splitting this into a series of articles. From this jump off point, we can start to map out the network of interests that sit behind your news headlines.
***
The NHS, for all their faults, now only recommend the mRNA vaccines if you “are aged 75 years old or over, live in a care home for older adults, [or] are aged 6 months old or over and have a weakened immune system”
Put simply, the NHS have stopped recommending the vaccine for healthy people under the age of 75. We can infer from this that the NHS no longer believe the benefits for covid vaccination outweigh the risks for healthy people, otherwise the policy would be different. It’s something Dr Clare Craig and I spoke about in our recent podcast.
It’s somewhat of an inconvenience to the industry pushing the mRNA vaccines because their UK market was drastically reduced from everyone, to the immunocompromised people and the elderly. Their profit outlook took a sizable haircut. Perhaps some lobbying is in order?