Beauty! Blighty jabs are working
Big relief for Brits
LONDON: Britain’s vaccination program is already reducing hospital admissions, deaths and transmission of the coronavirus, according to “encouraging” early data.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said yesterday there were “interesting straws in the wind” and “grounds for confidence” on vaccines cutting the spread of infection.
He said he would take “cautious but irreversible” steps in lifting the country’s tough restrictions because he wanted this lockdown to be the last. However, he said he could not offer a “cast-iron guarantee” that it would be.
Mr Johnson urged people to be “optimistic but patient” before the publication next week of his roadmap for easing lockdown restrictions.
He added that the government would wait for “hard facts” before it would decide to loosen any of the rules.
“The data becomes clearer with every day that passes,” the PM said, emphasising that the plan could not be finalised before next Monday.
Ministers have already been given data showing that vaccination is cutting illness by about two thirds.
Now preliminary figures comparing elderly people who have received the vaccine with those who have not are starting to show it is cutting hospital admissions and deaths.
A separate study that is testing thousands of healthcare workers for signs of asymptomatic infection is also beginning to show lower rates in those who have been vaccinated, a key sign that the jabs are reducing transmission.
Government sources caution that the data was very preliminary and was based largely on early Pfizer jabs.
A recent study by Oxford University estimated there had been a two-thirds reduction in transmission.
The news came as the number of new coronavirus cases reported in the UK yesterday was 9765, with the seven-day total down 29 per cent on the previous week. There were 230 deaths, with the seven-day total down by 26.2 per cent.
Everyone above 50 is set to be vaccinated by March 24, before the need to give second doses slows down the pace of the jabs.
Health service chief Simon Stevens said twice as many vaccinations would be given in the next phase as in the first.
Deaths are falling across the country, after a peak in cases about the end of last year. As a proportion of the total, though, those above 80 now account for 50 per cent of hospital deaths, compared with about 56 per cent earlier in the year.
Despite the run of positive news, the country’s long-delayed hotel quarantine measures that came into force yesterday were described as “fatally flawed” amid claims high-risk passengers were able to mix with other travellers.