All adults will be offered a Covid booster jab by the end of January, the Prime Minister has said.
Speaking at the Downing Street press conference, he said that the UK will ramp up its efforts to get booster jabs into arms.
There will be 150 more community pharmacy sites in England, as well as extra hospital hubs.
“Temporary vaccine centres will be popping up like Christmas trees”, said Johnson
Comparing the situation at the moment to last winter, the Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that we have one huge advantage we did not have then – the vaccination programme.
They have weakened the link between cases and hospitalisations and deaths, he says adding that the booster dose provides a much higher response than the primary course.
NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said that will be vaccinating the most vulnerable people first before offering the jabs to others.
“If you are not already eligible, please do not contact the NHS,” he told the Press Conference
The Prime Minister has said that there is no need for people to change their Xmas social plans after Dr Jenny Harries said this morning that people should avoid unnecessary socialising
In an interview this morning Harries said that people could do their bit by reducing the number of social contacts they have.
She said that even if our “vaccines appear to be effective, but we find that the variant is more highly transmissible, having lowish grade infection, but in very large numbers of the population, it could still be a significant impact on our hospitals.
“And of course, our behaviours in winter and particularly around Christmas we tend to socialise more so I think all of those will need to be taken into account.”
However the Prime Minister has said that there is no need for people to change their plans for meeting up with people, or for travel, in the run-up to Christmas.
He told Sky News that
“we’re not changing the guidance on how you should basically be living your life, except in a couple of ways. That’s do with putting a mask on in some contexts, such as retail, and public transport, to stop transmission. And also making sure that we check people when they arrive in the country …But we don’t see any need, at present certainly, to change the overall guidance about how people should be living their lives.”
Earlier Harries said that there was no sign of a surge of the Omicron coronavirus variant in Britain so far, the chief of the UK Health Security Agency said this morning, saying there was no rise in the proportion of tests with a quirk that distinguishes it from Delta.
Jenny Harries said there were five confirmed Omicron cases in England and 10 “highly likely” cases, but that was not a sign of an increase in “S-gene target failure” in PCR tests in Britain, which is a feature of Omicron.
“Right across the country we watch for … S-gene target failure, which is a sort of proxy measure,” Harries told BBC radio. Cases with S-gene target failure can then be prioritised for full genomic sequencing.
“We have seen no significant rise from the normal 1-in-1000 cases that we would normally have. So we’re not seeing that surge currently.”
The nine cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant in Scotland were all linked to the same private event, and none of the people who had tested positive for the variant had required hospital treatment, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said this lunchtime.
The Scottish cases account for the majority of the 14 cases of Omicron so far reported in Britain, and Sturgeon said that none of the nine Scottish cases appeared to be associated with travel from Southern Africa.
This morning saw new mask mandates and other measures aimed at curbing the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant came into force in England with face masks compulsory on transport and in shops, banks and hair salons.
All international travellers must take a PCR test by the end of the second day after they arrive, and self-isolate until they get their result. That is in addition to restrictions on arrivals from 10 southern African countries, who have to enter hotel quarantine.
Meanwhile The prime minister will be setting out the government’s plans for the booster vaccine rollout after the programme was extended to all over-18s this afternoon.
He will be giving more details on when people will be able to get their third jab amid the spread of the new Omicron variant
