If it may evade vaccines…

[Wingingthis]

Why are they lowering the booster age? Wouldn’t this, worst case scenario, mean more people have to wait months to have a big enough gap between to have a tweaked vaccine?

How quickly do you think a new vaccine can be developed, tested, manufactured and distributed? In reality we’re talking months anyway, especially if it’s rolled out following a similar programme i.e elderly and CEV, then through the age groups.

Gaps between doses isn’t something that would concern me for the booster programme right now.

Because the effects of partial protection across a large population are still very worthwhile indeed

I read somewhere that it would take about 3 months to produce a new version of the vaccines, so reducing harm considerably from earlier variants (which will not go away completely, even if new variant comes to dominate) plus partial protection for the new, could well be the key to avoiding hospitals being full

@Wingingthis

Why are they lowering the booster age? Wouldn’t this, worst case scenario, mean more people have to wait months to have a big enough gap between to have a tweaked vaccine?

It isn't immune evasion or no immune evasion

Likely it will decrease vaccine effiacy rather than reduce it to zero.

The effects of partial protection of mean people will still be important in minimising spread, and we do not even know if omicron will become the dominant variant anyway. It may not be able to outcompete delta.

I thought the JVT stated the decrease would be in the ‘protection’ of contracting covid not the protection against severity of illness or risk of death.

Either way, our current vaccines are effective against the Delta variant which is still very much around. We need to keep hospital numbers/other treatment relating to covid as low as possible, especially if we're in a position where the vaccines don't work so well against a different variant.

If vaccines do need to be tweaked it's going to take time to make sure that tweak works, get approval, manufacture - we can't afford to have two variants running riot for the next 3-5 months, so best to deal with what we've got.

IMO these terms 'vaccine evasion/escape' are unhelpful and misleading.

It won't swerve the vaccines altogether, it's more likely to be a case of somewhat reduced effectiveness. And even that's a big if -- at the moment they're working off very scant data. It may not be that much different.

So it's still helpful, from a broad public health perspective, to have as many people across all ages as protected as possible.

It's very unlikely that this virus would mutate to become completely vaccine resistant, and so the more people vaccinated the better, even if the efficacy is reduced.