Vaccine expert suggests Covid booster jabs may not be needed

Vaccine expert suggests Covid booster jabs may not be needed, and that spare vaccines would be better off being used on those who really need them.

The UK has been setting forth plans for a potential autumn Covid 19 booster programme but expert Professor Sir Andrew Pollard believes that this may not be needed. He believes that if the protection from the vaccines begins to wane it will be gradual, and this would quickly be noticed.

The UK is making plans for a booster programme but this needs to be confirmed and more research needs to be gathered on how necessary a booster campaign really is.

Sir Andrew has spoken about the lack of need for a booster campaign and said: “The decision to boost or not should be scientifically driven.

“The time which we would need to boost is if we saw evidence that there was an increase in hospitalisation or people dying amongst those who are vaccinated.

“That is not something that we’re seeing at the moment.

“But we have to also have an understanding scientifically about how the vaccines work and they are providing very high levels of protection against that severe end of the spectrum, but also, even as the levels of immunity start to drop that we can measure in the blood, our immune system still remembers that we were vaccinated and we’ll be remembering decades from now that we have those two doses of vaccine.

“So there isn’t any reason at this moment to panic.”

“We’re not seeing a problem with breakthrough severe disease.

“We have this sort of understanding of the biology that puts us in a good place to know that even if we started to see some waning of protection that would not be a complete switch-off of protection, we’re not going to get to the end of September and suddenly find that the pandemic starts again.

“If there was any fall-off in protection it is something which will happen gradually, and it will happen at a point where we can pick it up and be able to respond.

Sir Andrew added: “For that reason, at this moment, those doses that are available that could be used for boosting or for childhood programmes and much better deployed for people who will die over the next six months rather than that very unlikely scenario of a sudden collapse in the programmes in countries that are highly vaccinated.”

“If there is a stockpile of doses, then they really need to go where they can have the greatest impact.”

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