The world’s first COVID-19 booster study begins administering jabs

The world’s first COVID-19 booster study, led in Bradford, begins administering jabs, which will provide each associate with one booster jab. The study, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, will analyse the third dose of COVID-19 on patients’ immune response.

On June 1 2021, Deputy Medical Director, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Professor Alex Brown, became the first person to receive a third dose at the Bradford Institute for Health Research.

There will be sixteen sites incorporated across the UK, supported by government funding of £19.3m.

Participants must be thirty years old or older, and the study will cover those who were immunised early in the vaccination campaign.

Vaccines being trialled in the study include Pfizer/ BioNTech, Oxford/ AstraZeneca, Valneva, Novavax, Moderna, Curevac and Janssen, and a control group.

Principal investigator of the trial at Bradford, Dinesh Saralaya, stated: “We are very excited to be the first study site to launch this very important trial. We are on target to recruit a total of one-hundred and forty-eight participants in Bradford, all of whom will play a vital role in helping us discover how the various COVID vaccines work with one another so that we can be well prepared in the autumn when people are offered booster vaccinations. As we know, vaccines are the only way out of this pandemic and research is vital in the hope of us getting back to normal.”