Booster COVID vaccinations

It has been announced that the most vulnerable could be offered booster Covid-19 vaccines from September, giving them vital protection ahead of winter that will allow us to protect our hard-won freedoms.

  • Our vaccine rollout has already saved thousands of lives and prevented millions of infections – but we must now future-proof this progress and protect our most vulnerable from variants and flu ahead of the winter. 
     
  • That is why, subject to final advice from the JCVI, from September the NHS will offer everyone over 50 and the most vulnerable a booster vaccine that will prolong the protection they have received from the first two vaccine doses, and protect them from becoming seriously ill due to COVID-19 over the winter period.
     
  • Our first COVID-19 vaccination programme is restoring freedom in this country, and this booster programme will protect this freedom – allowing us to return to normal as soon as possible.

Comments

Jim said…
"Our first COVID-19 vaccination programme is restoring freedom in this country"

No it isn't. Everytime a goal post looks like its being reached its moved. We are supposed to be out of all restrictions now, we arnt. People who are "double vaccinated" are still wearing masks we still cant travel to all countries, still daft rules on numbers allowed (iterestingly you can have more at a funeral than a christening in the same place, and in a smaller place can have more watching football) there are still restricitons to freedom in place, most of which are contradicary and daft.

Now we are talking about boosters, I understand that viruses mutate, thats been the case for years, but by that very logic being double dosed is meaningless.

Constant contradicions, constant changes to rules, no one really knows what they are anymore, but then they only apply to plebs and not to those in government positions.

9:56 am
Chris Whiteside said…
The rules apply to everyone and that's why Matt Hancock had to resign.

We've still got a lot of restrictions and messy compromises in place but although some of the dates have been put back the restrictions are a lot less severe than they were a couple of months ago and the fact that this is possible is entirely because of the vaccination programme.

The reasons for the double dose is that the clinical trials showed that a double vaccination dose worked more effectively.

Going forward I suspect - and this is my opinion, not government policy - that we will need an annual combined flu and COVID vaccination programme designed to protect people against the latest and most common variants of both.
7:55 pm
Jim said…
Hancock resigned 24 hours late. He should have been sacked 23 hours previously. But boris gave him the option to stay.

Cummings wasn't sacked either. Mps can have bbqs of 50+ in Cornwall.

Constant contradictions in the vaccine stance. If a vaccine works why would you need a passport? Why would someone who has recovered need a vaccine? If mutations are the answer to that then what use is a passport for N out of date passport? And if we are at the point where we need to live alongside the virus, updating jabs for the vulnerable as you suggest, then why have we had restrictions when the vulnerable have been vaccinated for months.
9:47 am
Chris Whiteside said…
It would probably have been better for all concerned if Matt Hancock had gone a day earlier. But to be honest there are far more important things on both the credit and debit sides of his account than resigning a day late.

Prime Ministers always hate giving the impression that the press or the opposition can dictate who is in their cabinet and Boris is in no way unusual compared with his predecessors in being reluctant to sack people.

Not all the reasons for that are bad. Loyalty is normally a good thing, and Boris would be a complete hypocrite if he did not genuinely believe that people's private lives should be kept private.

Though in this case the key point was that it should not be one law for the people running the country and a different law for everyone else.

That is why Matt Hancock's position became untenable, as he himself rightly said in his resignation message, the instant it became clear that he had broken the social distancing rules he had quite literally ordered the rest of us to comply with.

With regard to your other points, it isn't a binary situation where the vaccine works or it doesn't. It's not as if the only outcomes are that it is completely ineffective or instantly makes everyone invulnerable. The truth is somewhere in between - a lot closer to the latter position but not providing complete invulnerability.


The vaccines very substantially REDUCE risks, they doesn't completely eliminate them.

That's why I expect to see the vast majority of remaining restrictions removed this month, but it doesn't mean the problem has completely gone away.
3:08 pm
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