Boris Johnson: Coronavirus vaccine ‘might not come to fruition’

UK PM warns new ways to control COVID-19 must be used, such as mass testing and tracing contacts of infected people. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says there might never be a vaccine for COVID-19 despite the huge global effort to develop one.

Johnson, who was hospitalised last month with a serious bout of coronavirus, speculated on Sunday that a vaccine may not be developed at all, despite the huge global effort to produce one. Johnson wrote in the Mail on Sunday newspaper “there remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition”. “We need to find new ways to control the virus,” including testing people who have symptoms and tracing contacts of those infected people, he said.

The British government is giving 93 million pounds ($110m) in funding to speed up the opening of the new Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre. Johnson said the UK is also supporting research into drug treatments to help people recover quickly from the virus. Business Secretary Alok Sharma said the UK was home to two of the world’s “frontrunners to develop a vaccine”. The projects, at Oxford University and Imperial College London, were making “good progress” at “unprecedented speed”, he said. But he warned “there are no certainties”.

“We may never find a successful coronavirus vaccine,” he said.

The British government relaxed some restrictions on outdoor activities in England last week and plans to continue easing rules over the next few months.

“I know this will not be easy - the first baby steps never are,” Johnson said. ’Calculated risk’

Governments worldwide are struggling to restart economies blindsided by the pandemic. With 36 million newly unemployed in the United States alone, economic pressures are building even as authorities acknowledge that reopening risks setting off new waves of infections and deaths. Pushed hard by Italy’s regional leaders and weeks in advance of an earlier timetable, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is allowing restaurants, bars and beach facilities to open from Monday, the same day that church services can resume and shops reopen. Conte said Italy could “not afford” to wait until a vaccine was developed. Health experts say the world could be months, if not years, away from having a vaccine available to everyone despite the scientific gold rush now on to create one.“We are facing a calculated risk in the awareness ... that the epidemiological curve could go back up,” Conte said on Saturday. “We are confronting this risk and we need to accept it, otherwise we would never be able to relaunch.” Coronavirus has infected 4.6 million people and killed more than 312,000 worldwide, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University that experts say undercounts the true toll of the pandemic. The US has reported 88,000 dead and Europe has seen at least 160,000 deaths.