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today promised to set out plans for Britain's autumn booster Covid vaccine campaign in the coming weeks.
The Health Secretary said officials were waiting for the results from a Government-funded trial into whether mixing and matching different jabs gives better protection.
'When we know the results of that [study], then we will set out the full plans for the booster programme over the autumn,' Mr Hancock told Breakfast today.
Findings are expected from the £19.3million Cov-Boost trial in the coming weeks, with one of the scientists behind the study saying results may not filter through until the end of August.
But pressure is mounting on No10 to unveil the plans by bosses who say they need as much time as possible to staff the mammoth operation.
Hospital trusts will have to juggle the campaign with an annual flu jab programme and the backlog of routine care that has amassed during the pandemic.
Experts believe two standard vaccine doses are extremely effective for at least six months and probably much longer - but exactly when immunity begins to fade is not yet known because the jabs are so new.
Officials will aim to give a third vaccine dose to the elderly and vulnerable for whom vaccines traditionally wear off quicker as the country moves into the colder months, when Covid finds it easier to spread.
But they want to know whether, for example, giving a Pfizer dose to a patient who has received two AstraZeneca jabs could give them even better immunity, as is the case with vaccines for other viruses.
Seven Covid jabs are being mixed and matched in the trial, including the three vaccines already deployed in the UK.
Matt Hancock today promised to set out plans for Britain's autumn booster Covid vaccine campaign in the coming weeks
A stampede of young people were vaccinated at the weekend (Tottenham Hotspur Stadium pictured) - but NHS bosses are already planning for the Autumn booster campaign
As well as the AZ, http://147.139.172.141/ Pfizer and Moderna jabs, Southampton University scientists are also looking at vaccines made by Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Valneva and CureVac.
They have recruited thousands of fully-vaccinated Britons to the study, which will record any side-effects analyse the antibody levels of volunteers to check whether the extra dose offered any extra protection.
The Government has spent around £15billion in total on doses of Covid vaccines and the NHS jab roll-out.
It has bought more than 500million doses, enough to jab the entire nation many times over, many of which are being earmarked for the booster programme.
Several of the vaccines are still in development.
Doctors and trusts are demanding a plan for Britain's autumn booster jab rollout within weeks.
Chris Hopson, head of NHS Providers, warned the country needs to move away from being reactionary to Covid and start planning ahead.
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He said the health service needs time to plan for potential Covid-19 vaccine booster campaigns to make them 'business as usual' instead of 'emergency response'.
'Flu jabs start in September, so if we're going to do one jab in one arm, one jab in the other, we really do need to know quite quickly,' he told Times Radio:
He said Covid vaccines were 'probably' going to be needed on 'an annual basis for, I don't know, at least five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years.'
Medics also want clarity from ministers on how long they believe that immunity from the first two jabs will last and whether children are to be vaccinated as England's proposed 'Freedom Day' arrived with little relaxation of rules because of the Indian 'Delta' variant.
The challenge of also doing the winter flu jab campaign as usual — and the potential of a combined shot to fight both the flu and — must also be overcome as well as keeping an army of volunteers on standby to administer the injections, experts warned today.
Almost a third of all adults in the UK have now had two jabs, while 80 per cent of the population has had a first jab.
But the elderly and vulnerable are expected to need a third jab to protect them this winter.
The cases all came from just 16 of the 167 countries on the amber list, according to the data
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS news" data-version="2" id="mol-430867c0-d290-11eb-9f70-efc4fed944dd" website says Covid booster jab programme plans to be set out in weeks