UK can’t ‘scamper down rabbit hole’ every time Covid variant emerges, says government adviser

The latest coronavirus data looks “encouraging”, a government adviser has said – as debate continues to rage over whether Boris Johnson should lift England’s last lockdown curbs on 21 June.

Sir John Bell, one of the government’s vaccine taskforce advisers, suggested the recent rise in Indian Covid-19 variant cases was not worrying enough to force a delay now.

“If we scamper down a rabbit hole every time we see a new variant we are going to spend a long time huddled away,” the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford said on Wednesday.

Sir John told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that current figures “don’t look too intimidating” but they still need to “play out for a couple of weeks” before the prime minter makes his decision.

“We do need to keep our eye on hospitalisations, serious disease and death, which is really what we’re trying to manage,” the professor said.

Government advisers are split over the reopening plan for 21 June. Prof Ravi Gupta – a member of the government’s Nervtag group – has suggested a delay of “at least a few weeks” would be wise.

Prof Adam Finn, an adviser on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation group, said the lifting of final restrictions on 21 June “may be a bad decision”.

Backbench Tory MPs are urging the PM to stick to his scheduled 21 June date, dubbed “freedom day”, for the lifting of social distancing rules and the reopening of nightclubs.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: “We listen to scientists far too much at the moment. They seem at times to be bullying the government.”

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Mr Johnson said on Wednesday that the lifting of all Covid restrictions on 21 June is currently still on track – but admitted the latest data is “ambiguous”.

The latest data released by the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday showed the number of weekly Covid deaths in England and Wales at its lowest level since September.

And government figures released on Tuesday showed that zero deaths from the virus were reported in the UK for the first time since July last year.

But clinicians are concerned that Covid cases and hospitalisations are rising in some parts of the country. Some 870 with the virus have been admitted to hospital in the past seven days, a 23 per cent rise on the previous week.

Dr Layla McCay, director of policy at the NHS Confederation, said: “It is of real concern that cases are climbing quickly, and our members are increasingly worried that this will lead to more hospital admissions.”

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Sir John Bell also warned that the UK could still be “slammed” by new Covid variants unless more is done to help poorer nations vaccinate their populations.

He said there will be 10 billion vaccines created before Christmas, but many have been pledged to richer countries who have acquired much more than needed for their populations.

The Covax global vaccine-sharing facility “doesn’t need money, they need vaccines,” Sir John told the Today programme.

“This disease is here to stay, probably forever, but we do need to move on and try and make sure we suppress the diseases as much as possible around the world.

“Because otherwise we’re just going to sit here and get slammed by repeated variants that come in the door.”