The United Kingdom is highly vaccinated against COVID, but it also has the worst rate of new COVID infections in all of Western Europe right now. Eight times the rate in France. Six times the rate in Germany. Twenty times the rate in Spain.
To a vaccine-skeptic, that might seem like evidence that the jabs don’t work. It’s not. The vaccines are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: reducing the rate of severe illness and keeping people out of hospitals.
The problem is that, as high as the U.K.’s vaccine rate is, it’s not high enough to block the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s transmission pathways and achieve population-level “herd immunity,” especially considering that vaccine uptake is slowing fast. And many of those who are already vaccinated are about to lose some of their protection as their antibodies and T-cells fade.
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Making the problem worse, people are gathering in big groups again and shrugging off masks. And authorities aren’t trying very hard to stop them. The government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted most mandatory social-distancing rules back in July and has resisted calls to at least partially reinstate them.
And then there are the kids under 12. Around 10 million of them, all unvaccinated, packing fully reopened schools.
Oh, and all of the above is happening right as a possible new form of SARS-CoV-2—a sun variant of the Delta variant known as AY.4.2—has appeared in the U.K., worrying authorities.
It’s a perfect storm of ambivalence and disease. “The population has given up face masks, government messaging on the continued importance of social distancing is poor and, most importantly, [there’s a] raging epidemic in school children,” Sir Roy Anderson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, told The Daily Beast.
The numbers are staggering. Officials have logged around 45,000 new COVID cases every day for several days now. That’s only slightly fewer than they counted on a daily basis during the peak of the previous surge in infections back in late summer.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the U.K. was a model for public health in the nearly two-year pandemic. The country administered its first COVID jab—a shot of Pfizer’s two-dose messenger-RNA vaccine— in early December.
For the five months that followed, the U.K. vaccinated its residents faster than any other major country in the world, starting with people 70 and older. But as authorities gradually authorized younger and younger residents to get jabbed, vaccine rates dropped off—a lot.
Today 67 percent of the 67 million people living in the U.K. have gotten at least one dose of vaccine. That’s 86 percent of the eligible population, ages 12 and up.
But 67 percent isn’t enough for herd immunity. Experts differ on what proportion of a given large population would need to be vaccinated to end transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Some say 75 percent. Some say 90 percent. Some say you’d have to vaccinate practically everyone.
Slow vaccine uptake among younger residents is pushing herd immunity out of reach. The vaccine rate for 18-to-29-year-olds has plateaued at around 60 percent. Pre-teens and teens between 12 and 17 likewise are getting jabbed very slowly. In the six months since authorities cleared this group to get vaccinated, fewer than one in three has stepped up.
“Vaccinations have stalled,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida who has run simulations of COVID in various countries, told The Daily Beast.
At the same time, U.K. residents are gathering without masks more and more often. In April, 91 percent of people reported they always avoid groups larger than two people, according to one Imperial College London survey. In September, that slipped to 40 percent, despite the spread of the more-dangerous Delta variant of the virus.
In the survey, around 60 percent of respondents reported wearing a mask outside the home. That’s lower than in France, Italy and Spain, where at least 80 percent of people reported wearing a mask.
Public health measures began to collapse at the worst possible time. The school year began in early September. Six weeks later, a staggering 8 percent of all secondary school students have been infected. More than 200,000 kids were out of school for COVID-related reasons this week, Reuters reported.
“Schools are certainly a major driving force in the U.K. surge because they are efficient transmitters within their families and communities,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health expert, told The Daily Beast.
The urgency is growing for U.K. officials to authorize COVID shots for children, Anderson said. “You need to vaccinate all [people] over the age of 2 to stop the spread.” But it’s not clear when U.K. authorities might allow younger kids to get jabbed. Pfizer submitted vaccine data for under-12s to American regulators late last month, but those officials have yet to act.
SARS-CoV-2 is running rampant through U.K. schools. But that’s not London’s only problem as the pandemic approaches its third year. Immunity might be waning for the millions of people in the U.K. who got their initial shots early in the vaccine rollout last winter.
Delta and other more virulent variants are a factor, of course. But so is time. Few vaccines have effects that endure forever.
U.K. residents who got vaccinated earliest probably now need booster shots. But booster uptake is sluggish, too. Authorities so far have authorized around 8.5 million people in certain high-risk age and health categories to get a third shot of the Pfizer, Moderna, or AstraZeneca vaccines.
But just 3.7 million people have gotten a booster since third shots got the initial greenlight last month. That’s less than half of the eligible population. Compare that to Israel, which swiftly boosted 4 million people. That’s 80 percent of the eligible population and nearly half the total population. “Israel’s rates of COVID have since come way down” as a result, Gostin explained.
If there’s a silver lining in the COVID storm clouds gathering over the U.K., it’s that the vaccines have blunted the very worst outcomes. Yes, the rate of new cases is disturbingly high. But it’s lower than the 60,000 cases a day the country registered during the bleakest weeks of the pandemic back in January.
Hospitalizations and deaths are way down, too. U.K. hospitals were admitting more than 4,000 COVID patients a day back in January. Now hospitalizations are fewer than 1,000 a day. For a few days in early February, around 1,200 U.K. residents died of COVID every day. Now just 130 die daily, on average.
The high-quality COVID vaccines work, in the U.K. and everywhere else. But they’d work much better if more eligible people would get their initial jabs and, later, their boosters—and if officials would make sure more kids were vaccinated before throwing schools wide open.
The U.K.’s struggle should serve as a warning, Michael said. “People should look at England and seriously relook policies regarding third boosters, child vaccinations and the need for at least mask-wearing until the pandemic is brought under control.”
