Total of 111,157 confirmed and probable cases of Delta variant identified in UK, says PHE, making up 95% of confirmed infections
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Professor Adam Finn, from the JCVI, said there is still “a high level of uncertainty” over whether booster vaccinations will be needed this autumn.
He told Sky News:
But in order to avoid the risk of a winter surge, we may well need to use booster doses, particularly I think in the first instance for the people who had the vaccine (the) longest time ago and who are at highest risk of getting seriously ill when they get infected.
So that would include the very elderly and potentially healthcare workers as well, who got the vaccines earlier on in the year. So I don’t think this is a certainty yet, but I think there’s a high probability that at least some boosting will need to go on this winter.
It’s not really going to be feasible to go all the way around and do everyone straightaway – as we’ve already seen it has taken more than half a year to work our way through the population.
And although vaccine supplies will increase, it’s a massive exercise to go around and immunise everyone again, and that may well not let it not turn out to be necessary, so we’ll see as we go.
Asked about the safety of people gathering for large-scale events, Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol and a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), told Sky News:
If there is a lot of virus around and larger numbers of cases, then putting a lot of people in one place will certainly result in others acquiring the infection, so it’s a very context-specific thing, and, right at this moment in time, we’re seeing rapid rises in the number of cases in the UK because of this more infectious variant, so I think it should be a time for caution.
We have what happened in the beginning of the pandemic, where large numbers of people went to race meetings and Cheltenham so on and, as a result, lots of people got infected and died.
Yes. Vaccines are very important for this, they definitely reduce your risk of both infection and passing it on but they don’t eliminate it entirely.
The safety of putting people together who have been vaccinated is greater than people who are unvaccinated, but if there’s a lot of virus circulating there will still be infections taking place.
