Important announcement

Herd immunity will not come

Prof Andrew Pollard, Oxford vaccine team

Clear that the delta variant can infect people already vaccinated

Making herd immunity impossible to reach even with high vaccine uptake

Anyone who is still unvaccinated will, at some point, meet the virus.

We don't have anything that will stop transmission,

so I think we are in a situation where herd immunity is not a possibility

and I suspect the virus will throw up a new variant that is even better at infecting vaccinated individuals

Angela Merkel

Ending free testing from Oct 11

Department of Health

UK vaccination, prevented 60,000 deaths and 66,900 hospitalisations

Never be enough to stop Covid from spreading

Winter wave inevitable

Professor Paul Hunter, University of East Anglia

The concept of herd immunity is unachievable

because we know the infection will spread in unvaccinated populations

and the latest data is suggesting that two doses is probably only 50 percent protective

Time to change the way the data is collected and recorded as the virus becomes endemic

We need to start moving away from just reporting infections,

or just reporting positive cases admitted to hospital,

to actually start reporting the number of people who are ill because of Covid

Otherwise we are going to be frightening ourselves with very high numbers that actually don't translate into disease burden

Sajid Javid

Preparations to offer Covid booster jabs from next month

Waiting for the final advice from the JCVI

Over-50s set to be offered the flu jab at the same time as booster

Sir Andrew Pollard

I think as we look at the adult population going forward,

if we continue to chase community testing and are worried about those results,

we're going to end up in a situation where we're constantly boosting

to try and deal with something which is not manageable

It needs to be moving to clinically driven testing

If someone is unwell they should be tested,

but for their contacts, if they're not unwell then it makes sense for them to be in school and being educated

Dr Ruchi Sinha, consultant paediatrician, Imperial College

Choosing not to vaccinate children would be unlikely to cause problems in the health service

What matters is the burden of patient hospitalisation

and actually there hasn't been as much with this delta variant

They tend to be the children who have got their comorbidities, obesity, or severe neurological problems

and those children are already considered for vaccination.

Covid on its own in paediatrics is not the problem