An expert says older and more vulnerable people will be put at risk by family gatherings and parties at Christmas because of a slow-down in the vaccine roll-out.
John Roberts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries said he is concerned that the first priority groups will not all receive their Covid-19 booster jabs by Christmas.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We have now vaccinated around about two-thirds of the over 80s and three quarters of those who are eligible, and I think we’re going to start to see over the next few days that that will start to come through, first in cases and then in hospitalisations and deaths.
“And so we are going to see that benefit coming through but we could have done it a lot quicker than we’re doing it at the moment.
“And my worry is that, at the current rate, we’re still not going to complete the first priority groups one to nine until mid-January.
“And that’s going to mean that there’s going to be a lot of mixing over Christmas with festive behaviour before and then on the day of people who haven’t got that extra protection from the booster, which really does make a huge difference.
“The analysis that we’re getting from Israel is that it will probably reduce deaths by 80 or 90% even.
“So it’s important that we get on with it as quickly as possible.”
The increase in the number of booster jabs given out has “stalled”, according to Mr Roberts.
He told the BBC “In England now we’ve given booster vaccinations to just under seven million people, but if you look back six months to how many had had their second jab at that point, it’s actually about 13 million, so 12 or 13 million.
“So we’re actually about 6 million short. So people who are currently eligible but haven’t yet had the job, and that gap has doubled in October, so we’ve gradually been falling behind.
“But having said that, the rate at which we’ve been jabbing people has increased over the last couple of weeks. It’s gone up from about 1.3 million to 1.6 million. So that’s a positive step.
“But we have seen that increase has stalled in recent days. So that’s not so great, because we really need to keep on increasing the number of people that we’re getting to, and to put that in context, during November more than two million people a month will actually become newly eligible for the jab.
“And so, we need to get it up to that rate just to do them, let alone catch up with the backlog we’ve got.”
