An extra 60 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech covid vaccine have been secured by the UK for booster jabs, Matt Hancock has announced.
The additional doses will be used alongside other approved vaccines for the booster programme, which the UK Health Secretary said on Wednesday is set to begin in the autumn.
Hancock said booster shots were the “best way to keep us safe and free” and “protect the progress that we’ve all made”.
Booster shots are designed to provide an immune system top-up while also offering some extra protection against new variants.
The Health Secretary added: "Our vaccination programme is bringing back our freedom, but the biggest risk to that progress is the risk posed by a new variant.”
The Health Secretary said the government had the “first concrete evidence” of how vaccines reduce transmission of Covid-19 within households.
The latest data looking at people who had been given one dose of a vaccine found they were up to 50 per cent less likely to pass on the disease to someone in their household, Hancock told a press conference.
According to the Department for Health and Social Care the UK had given out more than 47.5 million vaccine doses so far.
Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam said the third wave of coronavirus had waned because of the vaccine effect but that the success was in most part due to people obeying lockdown rules.
He told a Downing Street new conference that covid cases are now “at or close to the bottom of the level of disease in this country”.
But he added: “We now have to finish the job”.
The news came as Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), warned people not to ignore social distancing rules and “all go completely wild”.
He told MPs on the Commons science and technology committee: “We need to celebrate our success with vaccines. But we also need to be cautious because we don’t want to see what’s happening in other parts of Europe and other parts of the world here in the UK.
“If we can carry on with the messaging that we carry on being cautious, even though we are unlocking slowly in terms of the social distancing, the mask wearing and so on we may keep infection rates down.”
