MINISTERS and parents are being told young children should not be vaccinated against Covid-19.

Vaccination experts are not planning to give the green light for administering Covid-19 jabs to children.

Reports suggest that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) will not advise the Government to press ahead with a vaccination campaign for under-18s.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) are reportedly preparing to issue the warning to Boris Johnson.

According to The Telegraph, a statement could be released by the end of the week.

A source said: "Nobody is going to green-light the mass vaccination of children at this stage.

"Scientists want to see more data from the US and elsewhere before taking a firm stand either way.

"Nobody is going to make a final decision at this point. The JCVI will want to weigh up the benefits against the risks before vaccinating children, and it wants more data."

International Trade Secretary Liz Truss told BBC Breakfast: “Of course the Government will look very closely at the JCVI’s recommendations.

“It is my understanding that they are not recommending the vaccination of under-18s and we will be saying more in due course about that.”

The UKs medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for use among children aged 12 and over in the UK.

But as of yet, officials have not confirmed whether the vaccination programme will extend into children once the adult vaccine campaign is complete.

Academics have debated the issue, with some arguing that the UK should follow the US and Israel and begin to vaccinate children to prevent outbreaks in schools.

Others have questioned the ethics of offering vaccines to children when it would have little clinical benefit.

One member of the scientific advisory group Sage said that children’s chances of dying from Covid-19 are “one in a million”.

Calum Semple, professor of child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The risk of death is one in a million. That’s not a figure and plucking from the air, that’s a quantifiable risk.

“We know in wave one and wave two put together there were 12 deaths in children – in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, put together – and that is rare because there are about 13 to 14 million children in the UK.

“So we’re talking about vaccinating children here mainly to protect public health and reduce transmission.

“And it’s accepted that teenagers who are biologically more like adults are more likely to transmit.

“But younger children really are not – they are about a half to a third less likely to acquire the virus and similarly to pass it on.

“So we’re now coming into a really interesting ethical and moral debate here about vaccinating children for the benefit of others.”