...and SA variant ‘may make jab 50% less effective’
BORIS Johnson warned of a fresh border crackdown last night as Matt Hancock was caught saying the South African variant may make the vaccines 50 per cent less effective.
Ministers are finalising plans to tighten border controls by forcing travellers to isolate as soon as they arrive into the country at airport hotels.
The Prime Minister is expected next week to sign off on a proposal that would see arrivals spend ten days in quarantine in accommodation staffed by security guards.
Mr Johnson is understood to want to exempt British residents coming back into the country from the enforced isolation.
But he faces strong resistance from Home Secretary Priti Patel and Mr Hancock, the Health Secretary, who warned the policy will be ‘worthless’ if it does not cover everyone.
A decision had been due to be made yesterday but it was delayed and it now may not be announced until the middle of next week as the wrangling between ministers continues. Miss Patel and Mr Hancock had wanted Mr Johnson to go even further by closing the border to all foreigners – but even their supporters in the Cabinet admitted this was unlikely.
As he appeared at a Downing Street press conference last night, the Prime Minister said the Government would take further action to protect the country’s borders to prevent new variants from entering.
‘We don’t want to put that [all the effort to control the virus] at risk by having a new variant come back in,’ he said.
A Downing Street source last night said: ‘Putting some new arrivals in hotels to make sure they quarantine is something we are looking very closely at.’ The move to tighten borders comes amid fears that new strains of the virus could undermine the effectiveness of the vaccination programme.
In a video that emerged online yesterday, Mr Hancock warned that allowing the variant first detected in South Africa to become the dominant strain in the UK could send the country ‘back to square one’.
The Health Secretary said there was ‘evidence in the public domain’ that this variant reduces vaccine efficacy by ‘about 50 per cent’. But he added: ‘We are not sure of this data so I wouldn’t say this in public.’
He is understood to have made the remarks
during an online meeting with travel agents this week.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, last night told the Downing Street press conference that experts were ‘more concerned’ that the Brazilian and South African variants ‘might be less susceptible to vaccines’ but it was ‘too early’ to know.
‘Taking a result from a laboratory and saying the vaccine will be 50 per cent less effective, you just can’t do it. It is going to be clinical data that is going to tell us,’ he added.
The plans for hotel isolation are modelled on Australia, where all arrivals go into ‘government-approved mandatory quarantine’. London Mayor Sadiq Khan yesterday gave his backing to the hotel quarantine plan. He also told LBC Radio that ministers ‘shouldn’t be embarrassed’ at saying that people from countries with new variants cannot come to the UK.
Meanwhile, despite government sources playing down the likelihood that all foreigners could be banned from entering the UK, Environment Secretary George Eustice said such drastic action could not be ruled out.