British vaccine deployment minister Nadhim Zahawi said on Sunday that annual coronavirus vaccines are very possible.
“We most likely see an annual increase or boost in the fall and then an annual (vaccination), as we do with flu vaccines, where you look at which variant of the virus is spreading around the world,” Zahawi said. on the BBC, according to Reuters.
As reported by the media, the UK has administered more than 12 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to date and is on track to vaccinate all of the most vulnerable groups by mid-February.
The emergence of new variants of coronavirus has caused many health experts to call for a faster distribution of coronavirus vaccine doses. The new variants are thought to be more infectious.
Although several vaccines such as Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca have been shown to be effective against the UK coronavirus strain, they do not appear to be as effective against the South African strain.
During the same BBC interview, Zahawi rejected suggestions that the British government would use a vaccine passport in order to relax travel restrictions.
“It’s not the way we do things in the UK. We do them with consent, ”he said. “We still don’t know what the impact of vaccines is on transmission and it would be discriminatory.”
Sarah Gilbert, chief vaccine developer at Oxford University, said on Saturday that a version of the AstraZeneca vaccine that is effective against the new South African strain should be ready by autumn.
“It will be very similar to working on flu vaccines, so people will know the idea that we need to have new components, new strains to the flu vaccine every year,” Gilbert said.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the coronavirus “is not going away” and warned that the world will have to live with it “forever”. Bancel said health experts will have to wait for new variants from now on to create effective vaccines.