Current status: Answered by Jenni Minto on 3 October 2025
To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the potential impact on the NHS of the reported decision to exclude NHS frontline staff as a cohort from automatic eligibility for the COVID-19 vaccine in winter 2025.
In 2024, the Joint Committee on Vaccination & Immunisation (JCVI) made an assessment of the need to continue to vaccinate the frontline health and social care worker group for COVID-19. The outcome of that assessment at: JCVI statement on the COVID-19 vaccination programme for autumn 2024, 8 April 2024 - GOV.UK was that they no longer advised vaccination for that group.
In early 2025, in response to the 2024 advice from the JCVI, the Scottish Vaccination & Immunisation Programme (SVIP) convened a sub strategy and planning group of experts to review all available data related to COVID-19 vaccine uptake and literature on the benefits of staff vaccination, to assess if an occupational health offer of COVID-19 vaccination was required for the frontline HSCW group. Its recommendation was in line with the advice of the JCVI that an offer is not advised.
All four nations have conducted similar processes and come to the same conclusion and removed the frontline HSCW group from their COVID-19 programmes in winter 2025.
Over the last four years, population immunity to COVID-19 has been increasing due to a combination of naturally acquired immunity following recovery from infection and vaccine-derived immunity. COVID-19 is now a relatively mild disease for most people, though it can still be unpleasant, with rates of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 having reduced significantly since the virus first emerged.
The protection that the current COVID vaccines give against mild symptomatic infection is limited both in terms of peak protection and duration of protection. While there is an absence of robust scientific data on the added protection against transmission of infection from one person to another in the era of highly transmissible Omicron sub-variants, it is expected that any such protection would be extremely limited. COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent NHS staff from contracting COVID-19 and they have limited ability to stop them from passing it on to colleagues or patients, so therefore have limited impact on protecting the NHS and providing service resilience. All NHS staff remain eligible for flu vaccination.
The vaccines provide good protection against severe COVID-19 for a number of months and that is why the programme is now targeting those individuals where there is good evidence of a high risk of hospitalisation and/or mortality: residents in care homes for older adults, those aged 75 and over and those who are immunosuppressed.