Health and science officials in the U.K. said on Tuesday that administering COVID-19 vaccine booster shots every few months is not necessary, though a short-term booster rollout to combat the spread of the omicron variant is needed.
During a news conference, Sir Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief science adviser, said rolling out booster every few months is not a sustainable plan for combatting the pandemic, Reuters reported.
“It would be a situation that isn’t tenable to say everyone’s going to need to be having another vaccine every three or six months. That’s not the long-term view of where this goes to,” said Vallance, though he added that annual boosters, similar to the flu vaccine, may be necessary.
“We needed to get boosted for this variant at this moment. So I think there’ll be a change over time and this will settle into a much more routine type of vaccine programme,” Vallance said.
Sir Andrew Pollard, an Oxford professor who helped develop the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, echoed Vallance’s remarks, telling BBC Radio 4 that boosters multiple times a year was “not sustainable.” Pollard also currently serves as an adviser on vaccines for the British government.
“It really is not affordable, sustainable or probably even needed to vaccinate everyone on the planet every four to six months,” Pollard said. “We haven’t even managed to vaccinate everyone in Africa with one dose so we’re certainly not going to get to a point where fourth doses for everyone is manageable.”
According to Pollard, booster shots for those with vulnerable immune systems may be needed, but said it was “unlikely” that one will be needed for the general population. Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, added that the U.K. may be in a better position pandemic-wise if future variants are milder as the omicron variant appears to be.
“There will be new variants after Omicron,” said Pollard. “We don’t yet know how they’re going to behave — and that may completely change the view on what the right thing to do is.”