British vaccination minister Nadhim Zahawi said on Sunday that annual vaccinations against the coronavirus are very possible.
“We will most likely see an annual or a booster in the fall and then an annual (vaccination), as we do with flu vaccinations, looking at which variant of the virus is spreading around the world,” Zahawi told the BBC, according to Reuters.
As the outlet notes, the UK has administered more than 12 million doses of the coronavirus vaccines to date and is on track to vaccinate everyone in the most vulnerable groups by mid-February.
With the emergence of new coronavirus variants, many health experts have called for faster distribution of doses of coronavirus vaccines. The new variants are believed to be more contagious.
While several vaccines, such as those from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, have been shown to be effective against the UK coronavirus strain, they do not appear to be as effective against the South African strain.
During the same BBC interview, Zahawi shot down suggestions that the UK government would use a vaccine passport to ease travel restrictions.
“That’s not how we do things in the UK. We do them with permission, ”he said. “We don’t yet know the impact of vaccines on transmission and it would be discriminatory.”
Sarah Gilbert, the top vaccine developer at the University of Oxford, said Saturday that a version of AstraZeneca’s vaccine effective against the new South African strain should be ready by fall.
“It will be very much like working on flu vaccines, so people will be familiar with the idea that we have to have new components, new strains in the flu vaccine every year,” Gilbert said.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has said the coronavirus “won’t go away” and warned that the world will have to live with it “forever”. Bancel stated that health experts must now look for new variants to make effective vaccines.