With vaccinated people receiving their boosters, the horrors of Covid are now restricted to those who won’t or can’t have a jab
More than ever before, we must look behind the reported Covid-19 numbers in hospitals and communities to understand what is happening in the pandemic. We also need to better understand how the pandemic is playing out among unvaccinated people, and those who have been vaccinated.
To the public, the pandemic was and still is a silent pestilence, made visible by the images of patients fighting for their next breath and reporters at intensive care units talking about the fear of patients and the exhaustion of doctors and nurses from behind their fogged visors. This ongoing horror, which is taking place in ICUs across Britain, is now largely restricted to unvaccinated people. Generally, Covid-19 is no longer a disease of the vaccinated; vaccines tend to limit this suffocating affliction, with a few exceptions.
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard is a paediatrician and director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford
Brian Angus is professor of infectious diseases at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford