The British government remains “very confident” about the efficacy of all the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the UK, despite new research showing they are less effective against the South African variant of the CCP virus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday.
“We’re very confident in all the vaccines that we’re using, and I think it’s important for people to bear in mind that all of them we think are effective in delivering a high degree of protection against serious illness and death, which is the most important thing,” Johnson told reporters during a visit to a manufacturing facility in Derby.
The jab’s efficacy against severe disease caused by the variant, hospitalisations, and deaths has not yet been determined, according to the study, which was led by South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Oxford.
But the prime minister insisted that he had “no doubt that vaccines generally are going to offer the way out.”
“And with every day that goes by, you can see that medicine is slowly getting the upper hand over the disease,” he added.
Johnson said that vaccinologists are “getting ever faster and more expert in coming up with the new vaccines and the variants of the vaccines.”
Nadhim Zahawi, the UK’s vaccine deployment minister, told the BBC on Sunday that a “booster” in the autumn and then annual vaccinations with updated jabs are very probable.
