Why I can’t wait to have a booster jab

WHEN the time comes I will be eagerly lining up to get my booster Covid jab, and hopefully get a flu jab at the same time.

I am a big fan of vaccines — the fact is, they work and a recent study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), showed what a brilliant job the Covid vaccines in particular are doing.

Out of 51,281 Covid deaths in the first half of this year, only 458 (that is about 0.9 per cent) were in people who’d been double jabbed.

Yet despite the overwhelming evidence that Covid vaccines are safe and effective, there are still millions of adults in the UK who have so far chosen not to have one. They not only put themselves at risk, but the rest of us as well.

One of the vaccine-hesitant is a friend of mine. A few days ago she told me she hadn’t had the jab and isn’t sure she wants to. She’s in her 40s and doesn’t think she’s at risk.

As I pointed out, she might not become seriously ill, but if she gets infected there’s a good chance she’ll get long Covid.

While Covid kills mainly older men, the people most likely to get long Covid are women aged 35 to 69 years.

According to the ONS, around one in four in this group will have at least one lingering symptom five weeks after being infected, and the symptoms can be really unpleasant, ranging from loss of taste and smell to mental fogginess, being completely drained of energy, and, as another friend put it, ‘feeling like there is someone sitting on your chest’.

The best way to save yourself from long Covid is to get vaccinated.

A study by King’s College London showed that being double vaccinated not only slashes your risk of feeling ill if you get infected, but if you do develop symptoms, it halves the chance that these will persist.

I’ve told my friend the facts. I really hope she changes her mind.