Pharmacies will begin administering the COVID-19 vaccination today, the government said, as it seeks to accelerate the rollout of shots to millions of people a week to meet an ambitious delivery target.
High street pharmacies such as Boots and Superdrug will begin offering the shots, with two hundred community drugstores due to be included over the next fortnight, joining hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and seven large-scale centres in administering vaccines.
Boris Johnson said yesterday that the country was targeting a 24-hour, 7-day a week vaccination programme as soon as possible as it seeks to inoculate 15 million people by mid-February.
Meanwhile people who have had COVID-19 are highly likely to have immunity to it for at least five months but there is evidence that those with antibodies may still be able to carry and spread the virus, a study of healthcare workers has found.
Preliminary findings by scientists at Public Health England (PHE) showed that reinfections in people who have COVID-19 antibodies from a past infection are rare – with only 44 cases found among 6,614 previously infected people in the study.
But experts cautioned that the findings mean people who contracted the disease in the first wave of the pandemic in the early months of 2020 may now be vulnerable to catching it again.
They also warned that people with so-called “natural immunity” – acquired through having had the infection – may still be able carry the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in their nose and throat, and could unwittingly pass it on.
“We now know that most of those who have had the virus, and developed antibodies, are protected from reinfection, but this is not total and we do not yet know how long protection lasts,” said Susan Hopkins, senior medical adviser at PHE and co-leader of the study,
