Britain’s vulnerable need vaccine boosters now

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

‘Jabs will reportedly start to lose effect from July, six months after some people’s second jab’ (Getty)

Reports of a rise in Covid-19 cases and drop in tests contradict the government’s suggestions that the pandemic is effectively over for the fully vaccinated.

These hubristic assertions give a false sense of security to the vulnerable whose two Pfizer jabs will reportedly start to lose effect from July, six months after their second jab.

The government must address increasing concerns by giving boosters in time, or at the very least, a definitive statement backed by Pfizer or the regulator, confirming that they remain fully vaccinated beyond six months for a period not expiring before they receive boosters.

Prompt government action will avoid exposing this increasingly vulnerable group and those they contact, to the new transmissions of the variant and giving a further unwelcome boost to the third wave.

Trevor Lyttleton MBE

London

Paid to isolate

So the CDC reports that the delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and the most contagious airborne virus the director has seen in her career.  The ZOE data and ONS data suggests that the recent fall in daily case rates is likely due at least in part to people avoiding being tested.  

People not being paid benefits when forced to self-isolate would indeed disincentivise being tested.  And so, monitoring is likely also degraded. A report suggests that real-world home lateral flow testing, in any case, has an up to 42 per cent false-negative rate. 

And the unlockdown effects haven’t even started to filter into the data yet.

Perhaps it is time to consider a change in strategy? Or a strategy? Or a change in leadership?  Or actual leadership?

Ian Henderson

Norwich

Asylum shame

Thank you for your excellent leading article on Priti Patel’s treatment of asylum seekers.

I am driven to wonder what her and Boris Johnson’s attitude would have been to the Kindertransport from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, had they been in office then.

I am ashamed of how England’s attitude appears to have changed for the worse.

John Lewis

Address supplied

Lorry deliveries

When we talk about a shortage of HGV drivers in the UK, we are forgetting all those who passed their driving test before 1 January 1997. All those people already have the code C1 on their licence, permitting them to drive lorries up to 7.5tns without further training. A simple induction course by the employer would be sufficient to get them behind the wheel.

There must be hundreds of thousands of unemployed people 43 plus years old, who could take up job offers and get behind the wheel in a matter of weeks to put food deliveries back on track, using the smaller vehicles on simpler routes to lessen the burden on those who drive the big trucks.

Paul Finch

Somerset

Surgeries are open

I would like to reassure those who think GP surgeries closed down during the coronavirus crisis that they haven’t in fact closed down.

I work in an extremely busy GP surgery in Bolton and we have seen face to face patients throughout the whole of lockdown. Our doors never closed, although the majority of consultations have moved online or are conducted via a phone call, if a patient has needed to be seen, we have seen them.

This has all been whilst maintaining the best staffing levels that the virus has allowed us, and alongside co-coordinating the biggest vaccination programme we have ever experienced. Our surgery alone has vaccinated more than 25,000 patients across our primary care network. Our doctors have been no better protected than anyone else.

Our reception team, however, is now coming under an increasing amount of, often quite personal and shameful abuse, for just doing their jobs.

Primary care doesn’t care any less for its patients than it did during lockdown, but if you listened to some of the phone calls that our receptionists have to experience you would think that was the case. This has to stop.

M Tillbrook

Bolton