Covid should be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the current booster campaign, Dr. Clive Dix the former Chairman of the U.K.’s vaccine taskforce has said. The Guardian has the story.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr. Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the U.K.’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the past two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the U.K. should now end.”
He said ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells). This could help create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants, he said, adding: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
A rare moment of sanity at a time when policy seems increasingly to be driven by something other than the evidence. May it signal a change in the wind.
Worth reading in full.
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