Vaccine advisers reveal they are considering cutting six-month wait for booster jabs

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Vaccine advisers are set to consider cutting the six-month wait for booster doses amid surging Covid infections across the country.

Boris Johnson last night piled pressure on his scientific advisers to slash the waiting time from six months to five, which would make nearly 9million more Britons eligible for the jab.

And today Professor Anthony Harnden, the deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) which set the gap, admitted this was ‘something we will need to consider in due course’.

Professor Harnden said although the current wait hit the ‘sweet spot’ for bolstering immunity, the country’s runaway infections were likely to shift the equation in favour of an earlier third dose.

He also shot down calls for over-40s to be offered booster doses, saying the jabs were still doing their job in the age group.

JCVI chiefs have already set a precedent for cutting the wait between doses, after they slashed the time from first to second jab from 12 weeks to eight in July following a surge in Covid cases. 

Concern has been growing that the rollout of the Covid booster scheme has been far too slow, putting the public at risk as cases rise. At present, over-50s and those with health problems are invited for their jab six months after their second dose.

But less than half of those who are eligible have booked their top up jabs, with just four out of 8.7million Britons having got their third dose so far.

A record 240,000 people booked their third dose of the vaccine yesterday. Elderly people have said they are struggling to find out where to get the doses.

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday called on ministers to cut the waiting time to five months.

Asked whether the gap should be cut to five months, Professor Harnden told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I think it is something that should be considred, but I think the data has shown that six months is a sort of sweet spot.’

He continued: ‘Whether it is five months or whether it is seven months is not so important, but I think what is important is that people get their booster dose and I think if people could actually get that booster dose they will get that extra bit of protection.

‘So, whether it would be five months, six months, seven months and so on, on the JCVI we advised six months because that’s what the data shows is the sweet spot.

‘But as you know with the 12-week (gap), which was the appropriate gap for the second dose, that was brought down to eight weeks when infection rates were high. 

‘Infection rates are high at the moment and it is important that vulnerable people get their boosters.’

He also called for face masks and social distancing to return in the country, saying although vacines can do the ‘heavy lifting’ they cannot ‘do everything’.

The professor, who is also a GP in Oxford, told the programme: ‘We should be still maintaining social distancing, we should be wearing masks in crowded spaces and we should all remain sensible. 

‘The Government is currently coming through a winter period where we are going to have flu around as well probably and I think we just need to be cautious really as a society.’

Asked when over-40s should get their third dose, Professor Harnden said this was not something that they needed to worry about yet adding that these people received their second dose only relatively recently.

He said: ‘I don’t think we need to make those decisions yet.’

Mr Johnson agreed that it was an ‘extremely important point’. The six-month deadline was imposed by the Government’s advisers on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). The Prime Minister’s intervention suggests the JCVI may be asked to revisit the timeline.

Speaking during a visit to Northern Ireland, Mr Johnson urged over-50s to come forward and get their booster jabs as soon as they become eligible – saying it was important to ‘fortify’ defences against the virus.

‘The most important thing people can do now is get that booster jab. You get the call, get the jab. We have done about four million booster jabs already but as soon as you become eligible, as soon as you get that call, everybody over 50 should be getting that jab.

‘We are in a much better position going into the autumn/winter now than we were 12 months ago, incomparably better, because of the huge level of protection we have got from the vaccines.

‘Ninety per cent of the adult population has antibodies right now, but we most fortify ourselves further.

‘The numbers are high, we can see what’s happening, we can see the increase, now is the time to get those booster jabs.’

Earlier in the day, Mr Hunt said: ‘At its peak in the spring, we were jabbing 400,000 people a day. Now it’s less than 200,000 people a day.

‘If you look at the higher hospitalisations, cases and death rates, compared to countries like France and Germany, the heart of it is not actually things like mask-wearing and Covid passports, it is their higher vaccine immunity. 

‘On the decision that people cannot have their booster jab until six months after their second job, how hard and fast should that rule be? Does it really matter, when it is only nine weeks until the Christmas holidays, if someone has their booster jab after only five months?

‘Should we not look at having some flexibility on that decision, so that we can get more people in for their booster jabs more quickly?’

Replying, vaccines minister Maggie Throup did not indicate a change was on the horizon.

‘The JCVI has provided advice that there should be a minimum of six months after the second jab, but I would like to reassure the House that the immunity does not fall off a cliff edge,’ she said. ‘It has waned slightly but not sufficiently, so there is still time for people to come forward.

‘Obviously, we are encouraging them to come forward as soon as they are eligible, but they still have a huge amount of immunity over and above those who have yet to get their first jab.’ But later the PM’s official spokesman suggested that pressure could be brought to bear on the JCVI.

‘We want to move as swiftly as possible on boosters,’ he said.

‘More than 5.5 million people have been invited, more than four million doses have been administered so far and we want to move as quickly as possible on that.

‘As you’ll know, there is that six-month time period that the JCVI currently recommends… so it’s only when those people become eligible that we are able to provide their boosters.’ Asked about Mr Hunt’s call to cut the waiting time to five months, the spokesman said: ‘That six-month gap is on JCVI advice currently. Obviously we would expect them to keep that under review and if they were to change the advice we would want to be in a position to move on that.’ It comes as a new study confirmed the importance of a third dose for boosting protection.

A booster shot of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine is 95.6 per cent effective against Covid-19 compared with two shots and a placebo, the study revealed.

Ugur Sahin, the head of BioNTech, said the ‘important data’ added to the body of evidence suggesting that a booster dose could help ‘protect a broad population of people from this virus and its variants’. 

Don’t panic! He’s the expert who’s got every Covid prediction right. Now read PHILIP THOMAS’s peerless analysis of the new infection fright – and why there’s nothing to fear 

by Philip Thomas for the Daily Mail

Sajid Javid’s warning this week could not have been more stark. With rates of infections from Covid now rising fast, the Health Secretary said, Britain is on course to top 100,000 infections per day in the coming weeks.

That is a huge number — it would far exceed the near-70,000 daily rate reported at the height of the winter wave last Christmas — and has brought with it the inevitable doom-laden calls for a reinstatement of restrictions such as masks, social distancing and even more lockdowns.

As a mathematician, however, I can tell you that numbers alone do not always tell the whole story — and they certainly do not in this case.

Too much has changed since the dark days of last winter.

As this newspaper has reported, Britain’s world-beating vaccination programme has broken the chain between infections and rates of serious illness and death.

Indeed, a study this week by the Italian National Health Institute makes it abundantly clear: people who are fully vaccinated against Covid are highly unlikely to die of the disease unless they are both very old and already ill.

Booster

And let’s not forget, protecting the NHS from being overwhelmed with seriously ill Covid patients has always been the sole criteria behind ramping up restrictions, or plunging us into lockdowns.

So, instead of bowing to calls to reimpose restrictions — with their own devastating impact on the nation’s health and finances — the Government must press ahead with its booster programme, which has, regrettably, been slowing.

Mr Javid is standing firm, for now at least, declaring it critical that those eligible for a third jab have it.

He is right to do so: both clear data and the events of recent months show that the combination of vaccination and a growth in natural immunity have meant the virus has lost much of its sting.

I see no evidence to justify reintroducing any social restrictions — and that has been the case for a while.

Last spring, ahead of the nation’s July 19 ‘Freedom Day’, when almost all remaining Covid restrictions were lifted (which many branded ‘reckless’), I wrote that I did not believe we would see a third wave of any significance.

I was confident in this view because I had developed my own mathematical model at the University of Bristol, which I call the Predictor Corrector Coronavirus Filter (PCCF), to chart and forecast the shape of the pandemic.

It’s proved impressively accurate — far more so than the panic-inducing scenarios formulated by the Government’s advisers at Sage, who warned of rocketing infections if restrictions eased. But it didn’t work out like that, did it? In fact, the opposite occurred — and while infections initially went up, we then experienced a rapid drop at the end of July.

So let’s look at the current situation.

While infection rates have been rising in recent weeks (new cases are running at about 40,000 a day in England) my calculations do not envisage them running much higher than 60,000 a day for England — far short of the predictions we’ve heard this week.

Protecting

However, the key question is: who exactly is being affected?

Currently, it is mainly high-school children, an age group that hasn’t been vaccinated to the same extent as adults and which is also very unlikely to become seriously ill.

In recent weeks, the proportion of children aged 12 to 16 with Covid has leapt from one in 20 to around one in 12. In stark contrast, just one in 165 of those aged 70 and above currently has Covid.

As we know, it is almost entirely older people who are vulnerable to dying from the virus. That is why hospitalisations and death rates have mercifully not kept pace with the rises in infection.

Indeed, death rates for over-65s are now back to normal for this time of year.

However, it is also true Covid antibodies appear to lose some effectiveness many months after either vaccination or infection with the virus.

It is worth noting that harder-to-measure T-cells — groups of cells that target and destroy viruses — could play as big a role in protecting us as antibodies. But, regardless, a concerted programme of booster jabs can only be beneficial — if not just for the difference they make to infection rates. For instance, yesterday it was reported that in Israel, where nearly half the population has received a booster jab, Covid infection rates have now fallen dramatically from a peak of 10,000 cases per day in September to only around 1,000 cases per day as of Tuesday. The Israeli death toll has also seen a steady decline.

It must also be acknowledged that any rise in infection rates cannot be the only yardstick by which we measure the health of our nation.

Many of those shrieking loudest for the return of restrictions — either in the shape of mask mandates and vaccine passports under the Government’s ‘Plan B’, or harsher measures such as bans on visits between households under a putative ‘Plan C’ — fail to appreciate that a restricted society is also a profoundly unhealthy one.

Education is disrupted, enterprise wrecked, financial insecurity heightened and mental health undermined.

Immunity

Meanwhile, Covid is wreaking a tragic legacy on the NHS, with waiting lists soaring alongside the number of patients with serious diseases who have not been given the treatment they need.

Doom-mongers may also point to a possible rise in flu infections this winter, thanks to lower overall immunity as a consequence of lockdowns.

But to those concerns it is worth pointing out that an ambitious flu jab programme is under way for the over-50s.

What’s more, 50,000 deaths a year from flu and pneumonia were not uncommon in the 1990s, before vaccinations were widely given. No one thought of locking down then — and restrictions to regulate non-Covid illnesses would be a concerning new over-reach of the state.

Of course, soaring Covid numbers can look scary — even my PCCF model projects that total active infections could reach 1.2 million by the end of November (slightly above January’s peak) before starting a long fade.

But that number is manageable, as the vast majority would likely be among the under-25s — ensuring hospitalisations and deaths will remain similar to current levels.

So, yes, winter is coming. And, yes, Covid and flu infections will likely rise. But we need not be daunted.

If we commit wholly to this booster programme, then the wall of strong immunity we have developed will be maintained into spring — by which point I am confident we will be able to put the spectre of Covid behind us once and for all.

And as for fresh restrictions: the Government was right to ignore apocalyptic warnings in the summer. They must find the courage to do so again.

Philip Thomas is visiting academic professor at University of Bristol.