Boris Johnson pledges Covid booster jabs for all adults by end of January

UK prime minister Boris Johnson on Tuesday pledged to offer all eligible adults in England a Covid-19 booster vaccination by the end of January 2022 in response to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus.

Speaking at a televised briefing, Johnson said he recognised the “frustration that we all feel with this Omicron variant”, but argued that the government was taking “proportionate” measures in response to the new threat.

“Our single best defence against Omicron is to get vaccinated and get boosted,” Johnson said, adding that vaccines would be administered in more than 1,500 community pharmacy sites, temporary vaccination centres and hospital hubs.

At least 400 military personnel would also be involved in the expanded rollout, the prime minister said. He added that the programme would move down through age cohorts in five-year bands, ensuring that the most vulnerable are boosted first.

“It is time for another great British vaccination effort. We have done it before and we are going to do it again,” he said.

Health secretary Sajid Javid confirmed on Monday that the vaccine booster programme would be expanded to all over-18s, with the gap between second and third doses halved from six months to three in an attempt to curb a possible wave of infections sparked by the new variant.

Children aged between 12 and 15 will now be permitted to come forward for their second dose of the Covid-19 jab 12 weeks after their first and individuals who are immunocompromised will be offered a fourth booster dose.

There are 22 confirmed cases of Omicron in the UK — 13 in England and nine in Scotland. The NHS is now scrambling to devise a plan to deliver the additional doses after the unexpected changes to the programme.

Keeping up with demand and meeting the end of January deadline is likely to entail roughly a doubling of the number of shots that need to be administered each week, according to one senior figure involved in the delivery of the vaccination programme.

The person acknowledged that meeting the target in every region would be “touch and go”, particularly since it included the Christmas period, when people may be less likely to turn up for jabs.

Health leaders warn it will be a challenge to manage the expectations of Britons raring to take advantage of the new “boosters for all” guarantee, and to find sufficient staff and facilities to deliver the extra vaccinations as an overburdened NHS workforce faces what has been described as its worst ever winter.

Ryan Wain, political director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said that unlike last January, when the vaccination programme was constrained by the number of doses available, “we have plentiful supply, [but] it’s how we deliver that supply. It’s staffing and, to a lesser extent, settings.” 

The government, he said “will want to max out options to get to its target — so that means GPs, pharmacies and mass-vaccination centres.”

One person involved in the programme said the target could be met through “small increases for each of the different providers. So if you’ve got a community pharmacy, who’s currently doing, say, 20 vaccines a day and you take them up to 30, or even 40, that’s manageable . . . If you look at the statistics, most of the vaccines that have been delivered across the country have been delivered by primary care and by community pharmacies,” they added.

However the drive will also depend on the willingness of GPs to participate. Official figures show that in September 960,893 vaccines were administered by GP-led centres and the following month this had risen to 3,536,808, underlining their status as the backbone of the campaign.

Amanda Pritchard, chief executive of NHS England, on Tuesday announced an array of new financial incentives for GPs, pharmacists and other primary-care staff to participate in the booster rollout. She added that next week dozens more hospitals would join the 30 already involved.

However people familiar with the programme said that significant numbers of GPs were considering walking away altogether, dismayed that what had initially seemed a short-term obligation now looked set to impose heavy burdens for the foreseeable future.

The senior figure involved with the programme said that in order to keep staff, there was a need to give “some permanence” to the vaccination campaign. “I think we probably need to start planning on the assumption that we’re going to have to do yearly or biyearly boosters; if not, we’re going to start losing staff — and this isn’t just GPs”.

If GPs are reluctant to play as big a role in the current booster drive, part of the onus may fall on mass-vaccination centres. However, in some regions, around half have closed or scaled back operations in recent months. Having returned to their original use, they cannot be commandeered at short notice.

Andrew Lane, chair of the National Pharmacy Association, said his members were ready to step in and play a bigger role in the campaign. He told the FT there were around 14,000 pharmacies in the UK “and the majority of those offer a flu vaccination presently, so we have a skilled workforce out there ready to go”.

“I would expect more and more pharmacies to be brought on stream,” he added.

Whether or not Johnson’s deadline can be met remains an open question, particularly with the numbers willing to come forward for boosters still uncertain.

One person on the frontline said: “I think the critical thing is not to get too obsessed with the numbers per week. It’s to make sure we can maximise as much capacity as we possibly can for patients and if it takes us a few more weeks, it takes us a few more weeks, but we’ll get there in the end.”