Today, Wednesday, December 8, 2021, marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 vaccine programme after the first-ever COVID jab was administered in the United Kingdom (UK) on December 8, 2020.

Reports say Margaret Keenan was given a Pfizer BioNTech jab by nurse May Parsons at her local hospital in Coventry at 6.31 a.m. on December 8, last year. Thereafter, almost 120 million doses were provided across the UK in a single year, saving countless lives and preventing the NHS from being overburdened.

Following advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI), the booster programme has been expanded across the UK to all adults over the age of 18, and all eligible people will be offered a top-up jab by the end of January, 2022 as well as halving the minimum gap between second doses and boosters, according to a press release issued by the UK government.

Effectiveness of the booster vaccination

The UK Health Security Agency’s first real-world study on the effectiveness of booster vaccination against the dominant Delta strain found that top-up jabs improve protection against symptomatic COVID-19 in persons over 50 years old, two weeks following vaccination.

As demonstrated in the COV-Boost research, the booster vaccines Moderna and Pfizer significantly strengthen the immune response, increasing the likelihood that protection against Omicron will be maintained, the release stated. NHS Wales has already begun to speed up the booster programme, delivering more than 19,000 vaccinations every day. They hope to administer more than 200,000 immunizations per week in the coming weeks.

Despite efforts to scale up vaccination in the UK, the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus appears to be doubling every two to three days, Prof Neil Ferguson said, adding that it could be necessary to impose new lockdowns as a result.

Omicron is likely to be the dominant strain in the UK before Christmas

Ferguson, a member of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and head of the disease outbreak modelling group at Imperial College London, told reporters on Wednesday, December 8, 2021 that Omicron is likely to be the dominant strain in the UK before Christmas.

Ferguson, who was reported to be speaking in a personal capacity said “It’s [Omicron] likely to overtake Delta before Christmas at this rate, precisely when is hard to say”.

“We’ll start seeing an impact on overall case numbers – it’s still probably only 2%, 3% of all cases so it’s kind of swamped, but within a week or two we’ll start seeing overall case numbers accelerate quite markedly as well.”
Ferguson

The number of cases of the original Omicron variant detected in the UK rose by 101 to 437 on Tuesday, December 7, 2021 as Scotland announced a return to working from home. Fears of the spread of the new variant continues with the EU banning flights from Southern African States to contain the spread.

Effectiveness of existing vaccines against Omicron variant

With little known about the new variants, concerns are that it may be more difficult to contain compared to other variants. A new South African study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine may result in up to 40 times fewer neutralizing antibodies against Omicron than against the original COVID strain.

With optimism however, “We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalization, and there’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be so” for Omicron, said Dr Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director.

Dr Ryan said initial data suggested Omicron did not make people sicker than the Delta and other strains and “If anything, the direction is towards less severity”.