Now is the time for Boris Johnson’s famous boosterism

Around this time last year, Boris Johnson appeared before the British people to tell them that, as the vaccines came through in 2021, “the whole concept of a lockdown will be redundant”. Three weeks later, Christmas was cancelled. As the country edges towards more restrictions and rushes to get the booster vaccine programme underway, it is a timely reminder both of how quickly the coronavirus can disrupt plans and assumptions and, indeed, how complacent, vacillating and chaotic the prime minister can be when he really puts his mind to it.

The main difference with a year ago is of course the vaccines are now a defensive reality rather than a fragile hope. Mr Johnson is entirely right to push the system to breaking point and beyond to try and deliver millions of jabs before the omicron variant makes its presence felt. It is indeed the main priority, and it is right that all resources, and that includes the military, are deployed to push booster rates as high as possible and as fast as possible.

For a change, it is a moment when the prime minister’s often mindless optimism and baseless boosterism is entirely appropriate to the task in hand – getting people out of their armchairs, out into the cold, and into the Covid walk-in clinics. Too often the prime minister seems to revert back to happier times when he was mayor of London, when he didn’t have much power to do anything except some exuberant cheerleading and ridiculous photo stunts. It seems churlish, though it is fair, to point out that the booster programme in England has proceeded more slowly than the initial push, and the counterpart campaign in Scotland.

Despite the publicity drive, the appeal for volunteers and Sajid Javid personally intervening on behalf of a Sky TV personality, there are some doubts about whether the jabs and the jabbers will be available to live up to the public expectations. There’s also too little being done to counter the activities of cranky anti-vaxxers undermining the health of the whole community. It is sensible to wonder, in that context, how serious the authorities are about telling the police to arrest and fine offenders £200 for breaching the regulations. Last year, public compliance was so high that such disobedience never became a problem, but the eccentrics who think they are resisting a “new world order” might be more of a problem this time round.

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The scientific briefing earlier in the week confirmed that a booster dose can reset immune resistance to a higher level than after the initial course, and can form a broader personal defence against serious illness, quite possibly including new variants such as omicron. A wider, higher spread of vaccine and naturally acquired immunity contributes greatly to achieving the kind of herd immunity that can slow the spread of the virus – and omicron may well prove a highly infective vector.

Still, the measures taken thus far may not be enough to avoid another lockdown, and a second cancelled Christmas. The booster doses will take a few days to be effective, while we know the new variant is already seeding across the country, and it travels well and replicates freely. Even if the omicron variant is no more deadly than the delta variant and isn’t much more resistant to the vaccine, it still causes illness that requires short periods of hospitalisation. If its exponential rate of growth is even faster than delta, then it will exert much greater pressure on the NHS much sooner than was assumed with the delta variant. There could, in other words, be a higher Covid spike arriving more quickly than the NHS can cope with.

The sensible thing is to surely buy more time now through plan B measures: working from home, avoiding crowded places, more social distancing, more mandatory face coverings, closure of schools and more travel restrictions. The alternative is to risk another lockdown, and further loss of life and misery. Politically it is difficult to see the prime minister surviving another such catastrophe. He is either callous, a gambler, a very slow learner, or some combination of the three. None inspire confidence.