Killer virus ‘will hit UK in days’
Race is on to find vaccine as British scientists prepare to fly out to hot spots
MINISTERS are in a race against time to help British scientists develop a vaccine against the deadly coronavirus as they warned the infection was expected to reach the UK within days.
Officials working for Health Secretary Matt Hancock say that after three cases were uncovered in France over the weekend, the ‘operational assumption’ is that the virus will reach Britain by the end of the week – and possibly even sooner.
The Mail on Sunday understands the development has led Mr Hancock to order an acceleration in trials of vaccines targeting the virus.
Health officials are trying to track down an estimated 2,000 people who have recently returned to Britain from the region around the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began.
UK public health experts have also made a breakthrough by developing a genetic test capable of diagnosing the virus ‘on the same working day’.
A senior Government source last night said: ‘We are determined to lead the world in the response to this.
‘We are accelerating our plans for dealing with the virus when it finally arrives here and we are looking at sending our experts to the affected areas to try to stop it from spreading here.’
So far 31 people in the UK have been tested for Wuhan coronavirus – 17 since Friday – with all cases proving negative.
However, the source said the contagion was spreading through several stages – the outbreak in China, the spread beyond China and then the first positive case in the UK, which is expected ‘within days’. The hope is that imported cases can be identified immediately by medical teams at Heathrow, which is still receiving direct flights from China, and that any potential British outbreak is strangled at birth.
The doctors will then shepherd possibly symptomatic passengers into NHS care where they will be isolated so they do not spark a ‘home-grown’ outbreak.
NHS hospital staff have been told to look out for patients who might have the virus.
Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty has issued strict instructions to staff on how to protect themselves from infection.
However, as the virus has a week-long incubation period, health officials know that infected travellers could slip into Britain unawares – infecting others before becoming symptomatic.
That would trigger a major scramble to identify and quarantine all those who came into contact with the infected person, to stop a full-blown outbreak.
The chance of that frightening scenario was raised last night after it emerged that two of the three Chinese nationals who have tested positive in France arrived without showing symptoms.
One of them entered France by land after flying to the Netherlands from China, underlining the limits of airport screening.
With the prospect of a pandemic, scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on a coronavirus vaccine which they hope to be ready for human trials in less than two months. Infection specialist Professor Robin Shattock said his team had two possible vaccines to test on animals in a fortnight.
As with other tests being developed, these are not traditional vaccines which offer the immune system a small part of virus to recognise.
Instead, they provide human cells with genetic instructions to fight the virus, which should mean they are safer and quicker to progress through trials.
Professor Shattock said: ‘We are ready to rapidly move those into human studies if somebody wants us to respond.
‘We could be in human studies to look at safety and immunogenicity, within a period of months, which has never been done before.’ He
Infected travellers could slip into Britain
cautioned, however, that the approach was new and they were going from ‘point zero’.
The UK is also contributing to an international non-profit body, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), set up in 2016 after the West Africa Ebola epidemic. CEPI is funding three other projects to find a vaccine, two in the US and one in Australia.
It has set them a deadline of getting into human trials in 16 weeks.
The current record is for a Zika vaccine, which took seven months to go from lab to human trials.
Doctors fear if it takes that long this time, coronavirus could already have swept the globe.