Latest updates: health secretary expected to make a statement to MPs saying passengers arriving in UK must have two tests during isolation
- Covid vaccine: tens of thousands of nurses yet to receive first dose
- Mutation of Kent Covid variant discovered in Manchester
- Return to Covid tiers ‘could plunge millions in England into crisis’
- A third of Covid patients put on ventilator report PTSD symptoms
- Coronavirus – latest global updates
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation will announce who will get priority in phase two of the vaccination programme by early next month, one of its members said this morning.
The JCVI has drawn up a list of the nine groups getting priority, in order, during phase one of the vaccination programme. That will cover all over-50s, people with serious underlying health conditions and health and social care workers, and the NHS has said everyone in these groups should have been offered a first dose of vaccine by the end of April.
That discussion is ongoing at the moment and of course it goes beyond just medicine and public health as to who society values most and who they think are most important.
In terms of the JCVI, we’re very focused on the evidence of who’s at the highest risk and at the moment the outstanding factors predicting that is still age.
It will take some time, simply because although the new variants can be adjusted in the vaccines they then have to come through the regulators, and then have to be manufactured at scale in order to be available. So it’s not a matter of a month or two, it’s probably more than that.
But we currently have vaccines that are effective against the strains that are predominating in the UK and and that should be clear in everybody’s minds, that we’re not in a position where vaccines have suddenly stopped working entirely.
Prof David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the Today programme this morning that experts thought coronavirus was becoming endemic. Asked if it was something that people would just have to learn to live with, he replied:
It certainly seems like that in the shorter term, and probably in the long term as well. Most experts believe that this disease is now becoming endemic, but the good thing is that we have many tools including vaccines with which we can deal with this virus.
We know that borders cannot stop infectious diseases no matter how rigid your controls are, there will always be some that comes through.
We’ve seen that countries that have closed their borders, such as New Zealand, have kept the virus out, but now their problem is what do they when they begin to open their borders?
So I think the best way forward is to live understanding that viruses and bacteria, any infection, can cross borders and we have to have the defences in our own countries to deal with them.
