Oxford jab professor: We don’t need mass boosters
Dame Sarah Gilbert says vaccine doses would be better deployed overseas
A MASS booster programme is unnecessary because immunity to Covid from two vaccine doses is “lasting well” in the majority of people, the lead scientist of the Oxford jab has said.
Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert told The Daily Telegraph that it would be better to send Britain’s third dose supplies to countries where only a small proportion of the population had been vaccinated. She said that current levels of vaccination were holding up well, even against the delta variant.
“As the virus spreads between people, it mutates and adapts and evolves, like the delta variant,” said Dame Sarah. “With these outbreaks, we want to stop that as quickly as possible.
“We will look at each situation; the immunocompromised and elderly will receive boosters. But I don’t think we need to boost everybody. Immunity is lasting well in the majority of people.”
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is debating whether to advise that third jabs should be offered before a potential new wave of Covid strikes this winter. A decision on whether a mass booster programme will go ahead is expected in the coming days.
Yesterday, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) approved the use of both the Pfizer and Astrazeneca jabs for a third dose.
Dr June Raine, the MHRA chief executive, said: “We know that a person’s immunity may decline over time after their first vaccine course.
“This is an important regulatory change as it gives further options for the vaccination programme, which has saved thousands of lives so far. It will now be for the JCVI to advise on whether booster jabs will be given and, if so, which vaccines should be used.”
The JCVI is awaiting results from the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust’s Cov-boost study, which is trialling seven different booster vaccines. Data were understood to have been presented to the JCVI this week.
The JCVI has already ruled that a third dose should be offered to people with severely weakened immune systems, of whom there are around half a million in Britain.
However, Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, said on Tuesday that the Government was expecting to offer boosters to around 35 million people, and that the programme would begin later this month. “It will allow us to protect the most vulnerable,” said Mr Zahawi.
It is believed the NHS is planning to combine the booster with the annual flu jab programme, which starts in earnest this month.
Prof Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England, and his counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are also due to come to a decision imminently on whether to roll out the vaccination programme to under-16s.
However, a large study of millions of youngsters in America suggests that the risk of children suffering a heart problem after MRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna is six times higher than the chance of being admitted to hospital with Covid.
Dame Sarah has previously spoken out against the vaccination of children, saying she is not convinced of the benefits and believes that the jabs would be better used elsewhere.
“It’s very complex,” Dame Sarah said.
‘Immunity is lasting well in the majority of people’
“We need to get vaccines to countries where few of the population have been vaccinated so far. We have to do better in this regard. The first dose has the most impact.”
She also warned that Britain needed to be prepared to face another pandemic. “There are lots [of pathogens] carried in bats, for example, that could start infecting humans, and that’s down to us: thanks to more deforestation and destruction of the environments where wild animals live, they come into contact with humans,” she warned.
“There will be another pandemic,” she said. “It sounds negative, but we have to be prepared. There will always be another ‘influenza A’ pandemic. There are several every century, at least once in people’s lifetimes.”
What exactly is going on with our vaccination programme? Health Secretary Sajid Javid is expected at any moment to announce a new drive that will see half-a-million people with severely weakened immune systems offered a third jab, starting at the end of this month. The very idea of a “booster” jab, even before this scheme’s details are officially revealed, has sparked debate over whether a third injection might also prolong protection within the wider double-jabbed population.
And it comes at a time when the decision over rolling out the vaccine to 12 to 15-year-olds, as in countries such as Israel, Denmark and the United States, has still to be finalised, despite the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) this month refusing to recommend it.
While the UK’S fully vaccinated population stands at a notunimpressive 65.3 per cent, we’re no longer leagues ahead of our nearneighbours such as France and Germany as we were at the start of the year. No surprise, then, that many of us – scientists included – are asking whether we need to rethink aspects of our vaccination approach. Does it, for instance, make sense to splurge our vaccine supply on teenagers, whose immunity seems to be better primed by catching Covid than being vaccinated against it?
Among those asking questions is Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert – designer of the Oxford-astrazeneca Covid-19 vaccine, chief developer of the universal flu vaccine and winner last night of the 2021 Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award (not for her scientific genius but for her business expertise).
“It’s very complex,” says Dame Sarah, who does not seem to see a point in the universal vaccination of healthy children. She has a better idea: “We need to get vaccines to countries where few of the population have been vaccinated so far. We have to do better in this regard. The first dose has the most impact. As the virus spreads between people, it mutates and adapts and evolves, like the delta variant. With these outbreaks, we want to stop that as quickly as possible. We will look at each situation; the immunocompromised and elderly will receive boosters. But I don’t think we need to boost everybody. Immunity is lasting well in [most] people.”
Dame Sarah is already on the record as not being a fan of jabbing children for the sake of it. She has pointed out that countries should consider vaccinating the “small number” most at risk, but otherwise is not convinced of the benefits. “If you can’t prevent transmission by vaccination and the children are not at risk of severe disease and hospitalisation and death, which the vast majority of children are not, you have to ask yourself: ‘What would be the benefits of vaccinating children?’”, she told Italian newspaper La Repubblica in July.
“We are not going to eradicate Sars-cov-2. It’s going to continue to circulate... Ultimately, we have to move to the point where we are living with the virus.”
Dame Sarah first read about a novel virus spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan on New Year’s Day 2020. She had designed a vaccine for it within two weeks, which was granted approval 351 days later, one day before the year was out. Her own triplets, all studying biochemistry at university now, took part in the human trial.
A few stuttering months of confusion – prior to the European Medicines Agency declaring the overall benefits of Dame Sarah’s vaccine outweighed the risks of developing a rare blood clot – did not stop the vast majority of Britons who were offered it from rolling up their sleeves: Boris Johnson, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and Dame Joan Collins included.
How frustrating it has been, then, for Dame Sarah – who has since been lauded around the world, showered in awards, had a “Scientist Barbie” designed after her, and even invited to sashay on to certain celebrity shows, of which more later – to have been forced to spend the past year making clear that the vaccine is safe, not having been chucked together in a lab at top speed like a cake made the night before the village fête.
Indeed, she and Dr Cath Green, associate professor in chromosome dynamics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and part of Dame Sarah’s vaccine development team, have also taken the time to write Vaxxers (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), which explains clearly and in a very readable way how carefully and precisely the vaccine was developed. “We wanted to explain how we did this so fast,” Dame Sarah explains. “We appreciate it is natural for people to be hesitant.”
In a nutshell, the vaccine came down to two things: advances in technology and development, combined with the reality of working in a pandemic: there was none of the normal hold-ups to slow down the team. “We were able to overlap processes that you would normally do sequentially,” she says. “We followed the normal regulatory pathway. Yes, we did it quickly, but we didn’t miss any steps out. It is frustrating when people say development was too fast without saying why that would be.” Key to this was some unlikely help that came early on. At the start of January 2020, before the pandemic had been declared, Chinese scientists from Fudan University in Shanghai posted the fully sequenced genetic code for the new virus to enable the world’s scientists to move fast. Vaccinologists, she says, are a close community. “We’ve always known that beating Covid was not winner takes all. There was no competition to come first. We need vaccines for everyone in the world.” This businesslike approach is connected to Dame Sarah’s biotech company Vaccitech, which she set up in 2016. “I’m a scientist to my core,” she says, “but I’ve always wanted my science to make things better for people.” Vaccitech is already moving on, looking at way its vaccines could work in other conditions such as hepatitis B and prostate cancer. “That’s the dream – to have a targeted cancer treatment.” The Astrazeneca Covid vaccine uses genetic material shared by the coronavirus to teach the body’s immune system how to fight the real virus. In a cancerkilling drug, she says, “the tech would be the same, but we would put in a different cargo to create an
‘We’ve always known that beating Covid was not winner takes all’
immune response against cancer cells”. New vaccines are going to be needed all over the place, it seems. “There will be another pandemic,” says Dame Sarah. “It sounds negative, but we have to be prepared. There will always be another ‘influenza A’ pandemic. There are several every century, at least once in people’s lifetimes.”
Worse, she points out, there will one day be Disease X, for which the world’s finger will point again to small furry animals. She cites the Nipah virus, already present in bats and most prevalent in Bangladesh and India, as one likely source for a new outbreak. “It has a very high fatality rate – 60 per cent,” she says. “Even if you recover, you can develop encephalitis and die from it years later. Luckily, it doesn’t have very high transmission rates.” Women seem to have been at the forefront of science during the pandemic – does she think this shows that the laboratory glass ceiling is broken?
“Throughout my career, I have had a lot of female colleagues. What I have found is that there are a lot of us in healthcare-related disciplines and interested in research. But that changes when you get to the professor career point. Here, women are still under-represented.
“But don’t ask women like me why – ask those who stepped away.” Should the cancer vaccine turn up trumps, Dame Sarah’s global “celebrity” will only glow brighter. She laughs at this: “I’m in denial about the fame. Public engagement is important, but I want to concentrate on the work and not take every opportunity to be on telly. I’m not going to be on I’m A Celebrity – I’ve turned down loads of stuff.”
So, if she’s politely declined Ant and Dec, what about Strictly? Surely even Oxford vaccinologists want to do that?
There is a moment’s pause – about as long as it takes to administer a dose of the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine. And, is that a small sigh of regret I hear? “Not even Strictly,” she says. “I want to get back to the science.”