British vaccine development minister Nadhim Zahawi said on Sunday that annual vaccinations against coronavirus were highly possible.
“We most likely see an annual or an increase in the fall and then an annual (vaccination), as we do with flu vaccinations, where you look at what variant of viruses are spreading around the world,” Zahawi told the BBC said. according to Reuters.
As announced, the UK has so far administered more than 12 million doses of coronavirus vaccines and by mid-February everyone is about to vaccinate everyone in the most vulnerable groups.
The emergence of new coronavirus variants has led many health experts to call for the faster distribution of coronavirus doses. The new variants are apparently more contagious.
Although various vaccines such as Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca appear to be effective against the British coronavirus strain, they do not appear to be as effective against the South African strain.
During the same BBC interview, Zahawi dropped proposals that the British government would use a vaccine passport to reduce travel restrictions.
‘This is not how we do things in the UK. We do it with permission, ”he said. “We do not yet know what the impact of vaccines is on the transmission, and that would be discriminatory.”
Oxford University’s leading vaccine developer, Sarah Gilbert, said on Saturday that a version of AstraZeneca’s vaccine against the new South African strain should be ready by autumn.
“It’s going to be a lot like working on flu vaccines, so people will be familiar with the idea that we need to have new components, new strains in the flu vaccine every year,” Gilbert said.
Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, said that the coronavirus ‘does not disappear’, and warned that the world will have to live with it ‘forever’. Bancel said health experts should henceforth be on the lookout for new variants to create effective vaccines.