Covid booster jab bookings will open a month earlier to speed up the rollout

BOOSTER jab bookings will open a month earlier to speed up the rollout.

From next week the NHS will send out Covid vaccine invites five months after someone’s second dose instead of six so they secure a date in advance.

A Whitehall source said: “We want to get boosters into as many arms as possible this winter, which is why we’re going to allow people to book earlier.”

The fears are that the rollout is too slow and will leave millions of older people without the added protection over Christmas.

Vaccines will still be given only from the six-month mark, except for a small number of high-risk people, on the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said the top-up scheme has “considerable momentum”.

The deputy chief medical officer in England insisted that falling cases was a good sign.

He warned of a “problematic” Christmas but added: We’ll be in much calmer waters by spring.”

Another 41,299 cases were announced in the UK yesterday, down six per cent on last week.

But deaths rose to 217 and the number of hospital patients with Covid increased to 9,517.

The REACT mass-testing poll found record levels of infection in October, with 1.7 per cent of people in England testing positive.

Professor Paul Elliott, who runs the Imperial College London study, said: “Watching what happens in the next ten days is going to be really critical.”