https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58550833
Compare, however, with statements from Professor Pollard, who led the team that created the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58486526Prof Pollard...said decisions on whether to give boosters "should be scientifically driven".
"The time we would need to boost is if we see evidence that there was an increase in hospitalisation - or the next stage after that, which would be people dying - amongst those who are vaccinated," he said.
"And that is not something we are seeing at the moment."
and from Pascal Soriot and Sir Mene Pangalos of AstraZeneca:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58159573"We do not yet know whether that third dose is clinically needed," they say in the Telegraph.
...
In their article, AstraZeneca chief-executive Pascal Soriot and biopharmaceuticals-research-and-development executive-vice-president Sir Mene Pangalos say giving the most vulnerable, who may not have built up a full immune response from the first two, a third, top-up dose is "sensible".
But any decision to give a third, booster jab "to large swathes of the population", to extend their protection from the first two, must be based on clinical data, which is only a few weeks away from being published.
My limited understanding is that the real problem is the impossibility/difficulty at scale of identifying the small percentage of people who have failed to develop an immune response following vaccination. I think it is largely (overwhelmingly or even more?) those who make up the numbers of vaccinated people who are still dying of Covid.
In the absence of the ability to identify those in whom the initial vaccinations have not been (fully) effective, some scientists are expecting/hoping that booster shots will make a difference to a significant number of those people. If so, I presume that this should then show up in the mortality and hospitalisation rates within a few months of a mass booster programme starting.