The creator of the Oxford vaccine, Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert says giving booster jabs to everyone is unnecessary and that the does should be sent to countries in need.
The west has been quite appalling in the way it has hoarded billions of doses of the vaccine while poorer countries have struggled to vaccinate their people.
Will Johnson follow the science I doubt it as he seems to be very selective when it comes to the scientific evidence?
According to an offhand remark at this mornings press conference AstraZeneca doesn’t need a booster but the Pfizer vaccine will do.
As i say this was not a particular talking point but was mentioned. According to news reports Israel has found that boosters are needed but I don’t know which vaccine was used by them
@MrFraggle67 The important words here are ‘to everyone’ and if you consider some groups were only vaccinated recently that seems logical.
Story here
Some people will I think be offered boosters people who had the vaccination last winter and for whom immunity may be decreasing.
I think Johnson will follow this advice appreciating that having the manpower to give ‘everyone’ including the recently vaccinated a booster is not necessary during busy winter months and would will put added strain on the overburdened NHS.
The JCVI has yet to decide anyway…
I think that it is the duty of a leader to take care of his own people first and foremost .
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And how does that mitigate the appallng hoarding of vaccines that the richer countries, we are not safe until everyone is safe so we need to do far more for the poorer counties when it coms to vaccines.
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We had an email from our surgery, saying we will be called for both flu and booster virus jags. 
Listening to the professor being interviewed on BBC News and she is quite categorical that boosters are generally not needed and you would think she would know.
Call me a cynic, but I wonder whether that might have anything to do with the huge profits Pfizer are racking up because of their vaccine as opposed to AstraZeneca’s not-for-profit stance?
Maybe you should have told the EU that when they refused to allow exports.
That said I’m in agreement with you @MrFraggle67 but the UK has donated and is still donating many millions of doses as well as funding the most cost-effective vaccine that works and getting it licensed to be made around the world, with particular emphasis on supplying these cheaper vaccines to poorer nations.
If other countries did as much as we have the poorer countries would have been pretty much sorted by now.
The UK will have by the end of the year over 210 million doses stockpiled, I for one do not believe for a minute that the UK is doing enough to help poorer countries and neither does the WHO, the UK has ordered 500million doses which is enough to vaccinate the population 7 times over.
We richer countries really need to stop this bulk ordering of vaccines.
There is another thought about Booster Vaccinations I have seen mentioned, we need the data of how long the vaccines give immunity, give boosters too soon and this valuable data will be lost.
Israel has some data on this but they used mainly Pfizer vaccine, we need to know about AstraZeneca too.
The professor said quite clearly this morning that although the Israelies have started providing boosters as yet they have provided little data to support this action.
You’re relying upon the weasle words of our media I think because the stockpile you mention cannot possibly be of existing vaccines; I suspect that instead it is of ordered vaccines and not of physical stock.
I do not say this lightly and it is based upon two primary reasons.
First we actually ran out of vaccines or certainly ran so short that we had to slow down our vaccination programme, and that would not be the case if there was a surplus as has been suggested.
Secondly all vaccines have a finite shelf life. AZ’s is six months as is Pfizer’s which means that logically stockpiling is ineffective as by the time they could be used they would already be unusable because they will have exceeded the expiry date. There is as I’m sure you must see absolutely no point in holding physical stock of such quantities.
Therefore the “stockpile” is an imaginary figure based upon the numbers ordered and - as I’m sure is obvious - if you want to give people an injection it needs to be physically there and not in the form of an order for two years’ hence.
If we richer countries do not place orders in a timely fashion the greedy manufacturers increase prices and everybody suffers. See Pfizer etc. for proof of their price increases and this affects you and I just as it affects those in poorer nations, because we all must pay.
Again then I say that we in the UK have gone way beyond most others (all others maybe if you factor in what I said earlier about AstraZeneca?) in terms of our generosity in giving covid vaccines to those less fortunate.
It’s time others stepped up and did more too.
Let the WHO berate them and see what good it does instead of “soft-touch” UK yet again.
I am certainly not relying on the words of the media rather the WHO and other bodies.
But I feel you see that the Tory government can do no wrong even though their overall handling of the pandemic has been a shambles, the deaths figures speak for themselves.
I am no fan of our government.
But blaming any person or government for a viral pandemic and for infection and/or deaths is frankly ridiculous.
The handling of the pandemic is another matter, but it’s all very well moaning about what could have been in hindsight.
As for the death figures, apart from the inconvenient little fact that here in the UK we count every death within 28 days of a test as being attributable to Covid when nobody else does AND that we test more than any other equivalent nation ergo more will be attributable, you might like to consider why the statistics across say France, Italy and ourselves are so similar?
That is nature for you.
It has nothing to do with human intervention because that doesn’t seem to make much difference.
But you, like me, are entitled to our thoughts on the matter and if they differ then so be it.
The only certainty is that no matter what any of us think, it won’t change what has passed or what is happening now.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again for MrFraggles sake. You can test positive for C-19 on the 1st day of a month and stay symptom free but be knocked off your bike and killed on the 27th day of the same month. Now, what killed you? Covid or being knocked off your bike? According to our data publications, it doesn’t matter, it’s all Covid related because you tested positive on day 1.
Is there an epidemic of covid positive people being knocked off their bike and killed in the UK?
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Ha, ha. You’re always good for a laugh Bruce and for taking examples out of context. Of course, they could quite easily have died due to a heart attack or been in a fatal car accident or fallen down stairs and broke their neck.
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That is true but as happened this very week a 60 year old man died in a Sydney ICU of a heart attack, the heart attack was brought on by his inability to breath because of Covid 19. He was counted as a Covid victim and reported as such at the Premier’s daily press conference.
The number of covid cases that die of other causes is undoubtedly far too small to skew the statistics, it is a straw man argument if ever there was one.
The UK government has already manged to delete about 10000 deaths from the stats, they really don’t need you to provide any more excuses
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I thought this was quite interesting, it directly addresses the problem of vaccine effectiveness over time.
Not fogetting the UK had one of the highest excess deaths figures in the world in 2020, the government have changed the way deaths have been recorded more than once during the pandemic to obviously try and lower the figures and unfortunately the media for the most part have been complicit.
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