Vaccines ‘doing the job to cut Covid-19 cases’

LONDON: Vaccines are “doing the job” when it comes to cutting the number of people infected with Covid-19, a top scientific adviser has said.

Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol and a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said “everything’s moving in the right direction” when it comes to the impact of vaccines on the pandemic.

His comments were echoed by Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London and a key figure in ensuring the UK went into lockdown last March, who said that while it was still “early days”, a figure of two-thirds efficacy from a single dose of a vaccine was “not too far off”.

Public Health England (PHE) is due to publish data shortly which shows the effectiveness of the current vaccination programme. Prof Finn told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve now got to the point with the study we’re doing in Bristol where we can say with certainty that there is definitely an effect.

“It’s just hard to put an exact number on it at this point because… the numbers of cases coming through are still building up, the number of people who’ve been vaccinated are still going up, but it’s becoming clearer for the Pfizer vaccine, which we’ve been using for a month longer, since early December, and it’ll take slightly longer for us to get a firm handle on just how well the AstraZeneca vaccine is preventing hospitalisations too, but they’re definitely doing the job.”

Prof Ferguson said data on vaccine effectiveness and how quickly infection, deaths and hospital cases were declining across the country was looking promising. But he added: “The trade-off we have is between how quickly can we relax, and how quickly we can immunise and protect the population. And there’s still risks at the moment in relaxing too quickly when we don’t have enough immunity in the population bearing in mind that no vaccine is a panacea, no vaccine will offer perfect protection.”

Prof Ferguson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he thought the current lockdown should be lifted in stages, adding that the “downside of taking bigger risks is you risk having to lock down again which is even more disruptive economically and socially”.

Dr Mike Tildesley, who advises the government as a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), also urged ministers to lift the lockdown slowly.

He told BBC Breakfast: “We do know any form of reopening will cause the R number to go up so that needs very very careful monitoring. The vaccination campaign is going very, very well… but where we need to be careful is if we open too quickly and don’t allow the vaccination programme to help us along the way, we run the issue of things resurging a little bit.”

Elsewhere, Wales’ First Minister Mark Drakeford has said some aspects of non-essential retail, as well as personal services such as hairdressing, could begin to reopen there from March 15, with stay-at-home restrictions eased in three weeks.

All primary school children in Wales will return to face-to-face teaching from mid-March provided the coronavirus situation in the country “continues to improve”, he said in a tweet.

The number of people allowed to exercise together in Wales will also increase from two to four.