Ireland in for a 'fairly rough winter', says Mullingar immunologist
(Above) Professor Kingston Mills.
Ireland is in for a “fairly rough winter” when it comes to Covid-19, according to Mullingar native Kingston Mills, Professor of Experimental Immunology at Trinity College Dublin.
Speaking during an online discussion as part of this year's McGill Summer School, which is taking place this week, Prof Mills said that while our current Covid-19 vaccines are “very good” at preventing severe illness in most people, the rising number of vaccinated people getting infected showed that they were not providing “sterilising immunity”.
The number of Irish people contracting Covid has risen recently to levels unseen since the height of the third wave earlier this year despite around 90 percent of people over the age of 12 being fully vaccinated.
Prof Mills said that he did not understand why there was reluctance in this country to accept that people's immunity from vaccines wanes over time. The only thing that will “get us out of this hole we are in" is a booster vaccine programme, particularly for people working in the healthcare sector, he added.
While studies have found that the Delta variant is at least twice as contagious as previous Covid variants, Prof Mills said that the immunity generated after infection is “very effective at preventing re-infection with the same variant”.
“That will have a benefit. I would expect to see in the UK the numbers starting to come down in a few weeks and hopefully that will happen here in Ireland as well, but until we have a booster campaign designed to take care of the variants we are going to see this pandemic continuing,” he said.
Also taking part in the discussion was Dr Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation. He said that Ireland and many other European countries were experiencing the “roller-coaster of Covid” with the number of cases on the rise again.
He also predicted that cases would continue to rise as winter approaches and socialising moved indoors with the easing of restrictions.