Boris’s booster bet

Boris Johnson is relying heavily on the booster programme to protect Britain from any additional threat posed by the Omicron variant. The Prime Minister made that very clear at this afternoon’s Covid press conference in Downing Street, opening by saying that ‘there is one thing we already know for sure: right now, our single best defence against Omicron is to get vaccinated and get boosted’. Temporary vaccination centres were going to pop up ‘like Christmas trees’, he said.

He also seemed committed, if not to boosterism in the form of unbridled optimism about how the next few months would go, then at least to a reluctance to tell people to change their behaviour. He rejected calls for greater working from home, and dismissed the advice of Dr Jenny Harries to minimise socialising, saying that ‘the guidance remains the same’ and that the government is ‘trying to take a balanced and proportionate approach’.