Covid booster: Jab offer to all adults in Wales by end of January

All adults in Wales will be offered a booster vaccination by the end of January, the health minister has said.

More vaccination centres will open, with walk-in and drive-through options, and longer opening hours.

Additional help has also been requested from the military to allow some parts of Wales to double the number of vaccinations provided.

Four cases of the Omicron variant of Covid have been found in Wales with more set to follow, experts have said.

In light of the new variant, eligibility for the top-up of the Covid vaccine has been brought forward from six months to three, significantly increasing the number of adults now eligible for a third dose.

Students, fire services and council staff will provide help at clinics, alongside GPs and community pharmacies.

It will allow the NHS to ramp up the number of vaccinations from 19,000 a day to the goal of more than 200,000 a week.

Health Minister Eluned Morgan called on people to "prioritise your appointment over everything else".

She said: "With high levels of the Delta variant in the community and the emergence of the Omicron variant, you can continue to disrupt the transmission of the virus by wearing a face covering in indoor public places, getting tested, self-isolating when positive and getting vaccinated."

Meanwhile, some pharmacists want to be more involved in the Covid booster campaign, but claim their use in Wales has been "variable".

Joe Franchi is a pharmacist at Shackleton's Pharmacy in Abergavenny and said they will be doing booster vaccines from the pharmacy, similarly to how they run their flu vaccine clinics

"At the moment, we will be looking to do possibly between 30 and 50 a day, while keeping everything else in the pharmacy running as it would normally.

"If a lot more pharmacies like ourselves could get on board with that, there's around 800 pharmacies in Wales I think, so if you do the numbers there that could easily help massively towards that 200,000 a week figure."

He said the important thing was people trying to make their first appointment.

"That's the big thing, because the admin is huge when you are looking to reschedule appointments so my message to people is try and stick to that first appointment and don't try and arrive an hour earlier or later as you will cause peaks wherever you are having your vaccine," he added.

Mo Nazemi from Community Pharmacy Wales, which represents 700 pharmacists, said while December was busy, some members could play a bigger role.

"It's such a big piece of work and we strongly believe community pharmacies have the capacity and geography to help," said Mr Nazemi, who owns 10 branches of Evans Pharmacy in south and west Wales.

"The commissioning by health boards is very variable, it's not evenly spaced throughout Wales.

"That's challenging for some pharmacies because they want to be more involved."

Community pharmacies in some parts of Wales had already been commissioned to deliver Covid boosters to older age groups.

Dr Bnar Talabani, from Muslim Doctors Cymru, boosters were nothing new as all vaccinations given in history required them as antibodies start to wane.

The Cardiff-based scientist and doctor said: "Antibodies are what actually prevent us from catching the infection in the first place, if we come into contact with it, and providing booster vaccines just gives our immune system a top-up so that we can produce more antibodies and that will protect us against the Delta variant and that will also protect us against the Omicron variant.

"Even if some of those antibodies aren't necessarily directly beneficial against Omicron, at least some of them will be."

Dr Talabani has been myth-busting about Covid and vaccinations since the start of the pandemic and said the most common misconception she heard was that only vaccinated people were carrying the Omicron variant.

"That is not true, what we are seeing if you have had previously had Covid but you haven't had your vaccine, your risk of catching Omicron is higher than someone who is vaccinated."

Another myth the doctor has heard is that boosters are a reflection of vaccines failing when it was a reflection of the fact the virus was still spreading in high numbers.

The Welsh government said more than 400 community pharmacies have been involved in the vaccine rollout over the last year along with 58 vaccination centres, 46 hospitals and 96 mobile vaccination units.

On Tuesday, it will spell out how the expanded booster programme will be delivered.

Tom Halpin, who leads the vaccine programme for Betsi Cadwaladr health board in north Wales, said the expansion of the booster programme posed a "monumental challenge".

"We're currently vaccinating about 30,000 people a week across north Wales and we want to at least double that by the new year," he said.

Mr Halpin said the health board will be vaccinating people "seven days a week if we have to".

"You'll notice sites where we are now will be open more days a week, they'll be open longer," he said.

"We're constantly looking for more sites to deliver from. We've had a huge response so far from our colleagues in primary care.

"You'll start to see GP practices and community pharmacies come on board as well to deliver the vaccine so, really at pace, it's about getting as many people on board to deliver these as possible."