London – People aged over 70 could start receiving COVID booster jabs from September to protect them from new variants, the vaccines minister has said.
Nadhim Zahawi told the Daily Telegraph the first booster doses will go to the over-70s, health and social care staff and the clinically vulnerable.
Scientists have been developing booster jabs to combat new COVID variants.
More than 29 million people in the United Kingdom have now had a first dose of a vaccine.
Revealing details of the plan to the newspaper, Zahawi said the “most likely date” for booster jabs to begin would be September.
He said deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam thought “that if we are going to see a requirement for a booster jab to protect the most vulnerable, [it] would be around September”.
The first booster jabs will be given to those in the top four priority groups of the vaccine rollout – which include the over-70s, health and social care workers and the clinically extremely vulnerable.
Zahawi also told the paper that drive-through jab centres could be set up across the UK in the next few months to tackle vaccine hesitancy among younger groups.
He said: “We did some fantastic pilots of drive-in jabs that went really well. And again, as we go down the cohorts in the current deployment you’re going to see more of that.
“It’s a great way as you do the under-50s, the under-40s, under-30s. Convenience becomes a much greater tool to deploy because you want to make sure for those people, where we think there may be greater hesitancy, we make it as convenient as we can make it.” (BBC)
