Booster jabs may ‘not be needed’

THE UK is not currently seeing any major lapse in the protection offered by Covid-19 vaccines, the director of the Oxford vaccine group has said, as the Culture Secretary insisted the country was “not an outlier” in offering booster jabs.

Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, whose team developed the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine, said he believes the priority should be to donate vaccines to countries where people are still awaiting a first dose.

His views have been echoed by his colleague Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, a key Oxford scientist, who said booster jabs may not be needed by everyone.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said on Thursday that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs are safe to use as boosters, but the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has yet to give its advice to ministers.

A final decision and announcement on who should get boosters and in which order of priority is now expected early next week.

The JCVI has already said a third dose should be offered to people with severely weakened immune systems.

Several other countries, including the US, Israel, Hungary, Germany and France, have announced or have started third dose programmes.

Sir Andrew told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What I think is really important, and as JCVI will be, is looking at the data on whether boosters might be needed - so in other words, looking at who is ending up in hospital, who are the people who are losing immunity at the moment. And as far as I’m aware, up to this point, we’ve not seen any major breakdown in protection that we have in our population.”

He said immune responses “do start to fall” over time “and of course that is happening at the moment”.

Sir Andrew added: “Here in the UK the the levels of immunity have fallen, but that’s not the same as the levels of protection.”

He said that “in the vast majority of the population, we still are enjoying very high levels of protection despite that declining immunity” and added it was important to separate the two things.

Asked whether there was a moral issue over giving booster shots when millions of people in other countries are unvaccinated, he said: “I think for the politicians, absolutely, if there is a need to vaccinate people to defend health, then that is their responsibility to the electorate, to us. So that’s why it’s really important to follow the data and to look at where the potential is for improving protection if that’s actually needed, but there is a very separate issue which you raise here, which is the global situation. At this moment, there is a fire raging all around the world, with huge pressure on health systems in many, many countries. Covax is now in a very good position to start by buying the fire hoses for that fire. But what we really need is to turn the tap on and get the water to those countries, and we need that to happen.”