Boosters need injection of urgency after deaths of double-jabbed over-70s
THERE are deaths and there are needless deaths. On Thursday, the Government published its 44th vaccine surveillance report and in a table on page 18 it noted 2,032 deaths of double vaccinated individuals over 70. More than 3,000 from the same double-jabbed cohort were hospitalised.
The deaths are notable because some – perhaps most of them – could have been prevented with a booster shot. A few may have had a third jab but the data covers a four-week window in October, and for the vast majority, a booster, if it arrived at all, would have come too late. If, like in Israel, our booster campaign had started in late July, it could have been a very different story.
John Roberts, a member of the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group, who has been tracking the UK booster campaign since its launch on Sept 16, prefers not to dwell on what might have been. He’s focused instead on the six “crucial weeks” in the run-up to the intergenerational mixing fest that is Christmas.
“If the booster programme is as effective as we expect it to be in terms of saving lives, then the faster we do it, the more lives we will save,” he said.
Covid case numbers have been falling across the UK for the last two weeks, and most modelling suggests the decline should continue unless we suddenly see a rapid return to prepandemic levels of mixing. At the moment, many people continue to work from home, keeping reported contact rates for adults at about half the pre-pandemic norm.
On the other hand, for those of us who are out and about, the virus is never far away. The latest Office for National Statistics survey estimates the infection rate for England to be at about 1 in 50 – pretty much as high as has ever been recorded.
It is the high incidence of the virus combined with some vaccine hesitancy and the waning of protection offered by existing vaccines that is giving experts pause for thought. The NHS is also once again overstretched, with long waiting times for ambulances and even emergency admissions. “I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re going to get through the winter but that’s by no means certain,” Sir John Bell, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, told the BBC yesterday. “One thing that we have learned from this pandemic, not just in the UK, but globally, is that these waves come and go in a relatively unpredictable way”.
It is against this backdrop of the UK pandemic drawing to a likely end over the next six months, that new deaths will be judged. Already more than 13,000 have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test since “Freedom Day” on July 19. With boosters available and new antivirals about to come on stream, every additional life lost seems especially tragic.
“It was almost like a war effort with the first vaccine programme. And, you know, maybe we don’t have that same sort of energy behind this one,” says
‘It was almost like a war effort with the first vaccine programme. And maybe we don’t have that same sort of energy behind this one’
Mr Roberts of the current booster campaign, which has still to reach more than six million people who are eligible (see chart).
The main difference between the two campaigns is the involvement of GPs who delivered some 70 per cent of initial vaccinations. Many have not got involved this time around as demand on their time has increased. This in turn may have made it more difficult to reach older cohorts, says Mr Roberts.
As Christmas looms, ministers are now trying to catch up. From Monday, people will be able to book their Covid-19 booster jab a month before they are eligible.
“This change to the booking system will make it as easy as possible for people to book their booster jabs,” said Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary.
The next big challenge will be the distribution of antivirals. The news that Pfizer’s new pill cuts the risk of hospitalisation or death by 89 per cent is a potential game-changer. It raises the prospect that nine in 10 of all deaths could be prevented.
But that may not be easy as the pill must be taken within just a few days of symptoms onset. Dr Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter, said Covid antivirals should be rolled out the way Tamiflu was in the 2008-09 swine flu pandemic. “We had an army of people delivering pills to collection centres where people could come and pick up the pills,” said Dr Pankhania. “Writing an individual prescription for a patient is not going to work.”
Others wondered if the new miracle pills may arrive too late. It will take at least six months for volumes to scale up.
“The problem is we have very limited supplies of both these agents here in the UK,” Professor Penny Ward, a pharmaceutical expert at King’s College London, said. “I don’t know how fast Pfizer can ramp up, while Merck can only produce 10 million for the whole world this year.”