Covid booster eligibility age to rise to 80 from 2027/28, JCVI recommends
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has announced a series of updates for routine Covid and flu programmes for 2027/28.
It includes guidance that Covid-19 vaccination for autumn 2027 should be restricted to individuals over the age of 80 rather than the over-75s recommended for the past couple of years.
Residents in a care home for older adults and those aged six months and over and immunosuppressed will also continue to be eligible under the recommendations.
The committee said while Covid-19 continued to circulate in the population, incidence is declining and the epidemiological pattern ‘continues to shift’.
In 2025 there was only one wave of Covid-19 in October which was also at a lower level than previous waves and afterwards declined to the lowest baseline point yet recorded, the JCVI said.
It means that only one vaccine dose per year for those eligible may be needed in the future and more detail on that will follow, the advice said.
Viral evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has also continued to slow over the past year, the committee noted.
The highest hospitalisation rates continue to be seen in the elderly, particularly those over the age of 85 years, figures show.
But more work is needed to understand the impact of having multiple co-morbidities on the risk of severe disease, it noted.
For the influenza immunisation programme, the committee reviewed two new vaccines and recommended that one of them – a trivalent, adjuvanted inactivated cell-cultured influenza vaccine (aIIVc) – should be included in the 2027/28 programme.
The vaccine, known as Aujemflu, was licensed by UK regulators for the over 50s earlier this year.
A quadrivalent mRNA vaccine from Moderna would unlikely to be available by 2027/28 but would be considered down the line, the JCVI said.
Given the range of flu vaccines used in the UK programme across different groups, the JCVI said it would like to see more data across multiple seasons to review their comparative effectiveness.
The 2025/26 flu season started unusually early in children and young adults, the committee said.
Overall, the season was dominated by an influenza A(H3N2) strain that had drifted from that recommended for use in the vaccine by the World Health Organization.
However, the vaccine appeared to retain ‘meaningful effectiveness’ against outcomes measured in both primary and secondary care.
The school vaccination programme in children had its strongest ever start which helped reduce transmission to the wider population, the committee concluded.
For 2025/26, 3,798 excess deaths attributable to flu were reported compared to 9,740 the previous year and 14,378 in 2022/23.
The Government makes final decisions on vaccination programmes after receiving JCVI recommendations.
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We shut down the Economy, cancelled our children’s education, for an infection so dangerous that almost nobody under 80 years of age needs vaccination against it