Covid booster bookings have opened for around 400,000 immunosuppressed adults, with the £10/jab fee supplement for participating PCNs extended.
The online booking service today opened for severely immunosuppressed people aged 16 and over, who are eligible for a fourth jab at least three months on from their three-dose primary course and can book an appointment a month in advance, NHS England said.
Immunosuppressed adults who are eligible for a fourth dose can also access this at a walk-in vaccination clinic, with the ‘majority’ of fourth doses administered through hospital consultants and GPs, NHS England said.
More than nine in 10 of this cohort have had a third Covid vaccination so far, it added.
It comes as an update to the enhanced service specification for the booster programme, published on Thursday last week, said the £10 supplementary payment for jabs delivered to the severely immunosuppressed will be extended until 31 March 2022.
It said the payment, which was previously due to expire on 31 January, is ‘in recognition of the need to re-run searches to identify those eligible and ensure the GP practices within the PCN grouping maintain an accurate list of those eligible patients in this cohort’.
Meanwhile, NHS England has also urged people who were infected with Covid over the Christmas period to get their booster ‘without delay’.
It said over the weekend that more than four million people in England tested positive for Covid in December and were therefore unable to take up the offer of a booster jab for at least 28 days in line with JCVI advice.
More than five million reminder texts – including more than four million for boosters – were sent last week, as new data shows there are 6.3 million people who are overdue their booster by six weeks or more, it added.
The latest UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data, published last week, has shown that boosters provide a ‘high level of protection against death’ with the Omicron variant.
Around six months after a second dose of any Covid vaccine, protection against death with Omicron was around 60% in the over-50s, rising to around 95% two weeks after receiving a booster.
The data also showed that boosters provide high levels of protection against hospitalisation. Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation started at around 90% up to 10 weeks after vaccination with a Pfizer booster and 90-95% for up to nine weeks after a Moderna booster.
NHS England last week told GPs to ‘restore routine services’ following an ‘incredible’ Covid booster drive.
