London, Europe Brief News – Fourth-dose Covid booster vaccines increase protection against Covid-19, particularly in people aged over 70, according to a UK trial.
But scientists say any short-term protection against infection is likely to fall away quickly.
The UK rolled out fourth doses to over-75s and the most vulnerable in April.
A larger group of people may be offered a booster in the autumn, but any decision will be based on advice from the UK’s vaccine committee.
It is likely to look at whether new worrying variants are spreading, and Covid pressure on hospitals.
Some countries, such as Germany, have already started offering all adults a fourth dose.
Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said the study findings were “further evidence underlining the importance of people coming forward for their booster as soon as they are eligible”.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) earlier revealed that nearly three times as many people have died as a result of COVID-19 as official data indicates.
There were 14.9 million excess deaths associated with COVID-19 by the end of 2021, the UN body said on Thursday. The official count of deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 and reported to WHO in that period, from January 2020 to the end of December 2021, is slightly more than 5.4 million.
Nearly 50 percent of the deaths that until now had not been counted were in India, WHO said, where 4.7 million people were reported to have died as a result of the pandemic – a tally 10 times higher than the country’s own official figure and almost a third of the global total.
