Britain’s booster programme for Covid-19 vaccinations is to be expanded to younger people after scientists gave the green light on Monday.
The UK government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said all healthy adults aged 40-49 should be offered a booster, six months after their second dose.
Previously, the booster programme was limited to those aged 50 and over, and the clinically vulnerable. Some 12.6 million Britons have received a third jab.
The JCVI also said that 16 and 17-year-olds should now be offered a second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab.
That age group had previously been offered only one dose in Britain, pending more data on the jab’s safety in under-18s.
The expanded age groups covered by the new advice will “help extend our protection into 2022”, professor Wei Shen Lim of the JCVI said in a statement. The UK launched the Western world’s first mass vaccination campaign against Covid-19 in December 2020, about a year after the disease emerged in China.
But Britain’s government has been repeatedly criticised for its response to the pandemic more generally.—AP
