HKU's Cowling: Vaccinate Elders, Not Children

A leading epidemiologist, Benjamin Cowling, said on Friday that the government should divert resources away from inoculating children against Covid towards boosting the vaccination rate in elderly people.

Speaking on RTHK's Hong Kong Today programme, the University of Hong Kong academic said that there had been an exponential increase in Covid-19 cases in the past couple of weeks and said that vaccinating elderly people should now be the priority.

"At least one community vaccination centre is a child-only community vaccination centre, and I would imagine that that centre and the staff could be diverted to an elderly-only vaccination centre rather than a child-only vaccination centre," Cowling told RTHK's Samantha Butler.

"Maybe some of the teams that are currently doing other activities to do with containment could switch over and be used to take vaccines to elderly homes and administer them in elderly homes or take them into the community, to housing estates, set up booths and so on.

"Really, vaccination of the elderly would make a massive difference now, given the likelihood that there are going to be more and more infections coming."

Just over 30 percent of people aged 80 and over are vaccinated, official data shows.

Cowling, chair professor of epidemiology at HKU, noted that the government still seemed intent on getting case numbers down to zero, but he said that measures adopted in previous waves would not be enough to stem a wave driven by the Omicron variant.

"If it's not feasible to get back down to zero then we need to think carefully about what the strategy is," added Cowling. "Because if we spend a lot of energy, a lot of resources, a lot of energy on containment when it's really difficult to contain, we're missing the chance to do better mitigation instead.

"And I still think the absolute priority right now is to get older people vaccinated, and in the last couple of weeks we've seen an increase in vaccination rates, but it's a small increase."