What Britain should learn from Israel about booster shots

It’s hard to remember a time when politicians have so publicly put pressure on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Even the vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said this week that the booster programme is his ‘absolute priority’ as it will ‘help us to transition the virus from pandemic to endemic status’. So why is the JCVI so against booster jabs in all but the rarest of cases? My understanding is that its thinking has three parts. First, that the UK has not experienced Israel’s waning immunity against infection because we have had a longer gap between doses. Second, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been widely used here but not in Israel, provides longer-term immunity against infection than the Pfizer jab, which has been deployed in both countries. And third, although not explicitly stated, the belief we shouldn’t be using vaccines here when much of the world is unvaccinated.

The JCVI chairman, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, hasn’t been shy in publicly arguing against booster shots. While he recused himself from all of JCVI’s Covid meetings, he says the developing world has greater need. I am told his thinking has influenced other committee members. So while the JCVI will not take a wider view on the effect of vaccinating children in the community in the UK, it seems happy to deny boosters to the UK because of the lack of vaccines available globally.

There are problems with each of these assumptions. There’s strong evidence of waning infection immunity in the UK: recent published studies from Oxford University and King’s College London have demonstrated this. Yes, Israel’s problem is more advanced than ours, but the pandemic has taught us that countries don’t suffer in lockstep — winter in the UK isn’t the same as autumn in Israel. The Oxford data showed, too, that immunity from the Pfizer vaccine was initially more potent than AstraZeneca’s; it dropped more rapidly, but that doesn’t mean it will continue to do so at the same rate.