Boris says Christmas parties and nativity plays shouldn’t be cancelled

The prime minister sought to calm fears of a return to social distancing as he revealed details of the sped-up booster vaccine rollout at a Covid press conference on Monday.

Asked whether people should be cancelling Christmas parties and nativity plays, he said: ‘We don’t want people to cancel such events and we think that overwhelmingly the best thing for kids is to be in school as i’ve said many times throughout this pandemic.

His reassurances appeared to clash with comments from one of the government’s top health officials, who urged people not to socialise ‘unless you need to’ over the festive period.

Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency and Test and Trace, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier on Monday that people ‘do need to be careful’ with their Christmas plans.

She said: ‘We’ve seen that not everybody has gone back to work and I’d like to think of it more in a general way, which is if we all decrease our social contacts a little bit, actually that helps to keep the variant at bay.

‘So I think being careful, not socialising when we don’t particularly need to and particularly going and getting those booster jabs which, of course, people will now be able to have at a three-month interval from their primary course.’

She said caution was needed as, despite the apparent effectiveness of vaccines against Omicron, ‘having lowish grade infection but in large numbers of the population could still have a significant impact on our hospitals’.