EU’s ‘hopeless’ response to variants puts Britain at risk

UK’s success is threatened because Europe has no idea what is going on, says vaccine lead scientist

THE biggest risk to the UK is Europe’s failure to get the South Africa strain under control, a leading member of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine team has warned.

Europe’s “hopeless” response to Covid-19 has meant Britain risks the South African strain “flooding in the back door” when travel resumes, Sir John Bell told The Sunday Telegraph.

France and Poland are currently experiencing third waves, with fears that Germany will follow. A new lockdown in Paris began yesterday.

The Oxford University’s regius professor of medicine and government life sciences champion said a major failure in Europe was the lack of genome sequencing to tell which variants are spreading where. He said the continent had “no idea what’s going on”.

“They’re hopeless. Completely hopeless. It’s really not going well in Europe.”

Figures late last week suggested that France in particular was seeing a much higher proportion of the South African strain among its Covid-19 cases than Britain – between 5 and 10 per cent – meaning as many as 3,000 cases. In the UK, around 259 South Africa strain cases have been recorded.

While there is no definitive data yet on whether the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines work against the South African strain, experts believe the vaccines will be able to stop severe cases. However, Sir John said the goal was to also reduce transmissions with moderate and mild disease, reducing the R rate and ultimately leading the virus to die out.

“We think the AstraZeneca vaccine is pretty good at reducing transmissions, but not with the South Africa strain.

And I think the same will be true with Johnson and Pfizer and everybody else.

“I think our biggest risk in the UK will be that South Africa gets to us from the European continent, where there’s quite a lot of it now.”

He said the problem with having this virus spreading and being unable to curb mild and moderate disease was that, “with so much virus milling around, you’ll get variants of all kinds popping up, and who knows, maybe they’ll lose fitness and it’ll all die out – but it could also get a lot worse”.

Among the science community last week, there was growing concern over the strains spreading in Europe, with Prof Neil Ferguson saying on Friday that he was “optimistic, with this one caveat that we do need to keep these variants of concern at bay”.

Sir John said vaccination efforts by individual countries would not be enough, arguing that purely “having everybody vaccinated [within your own country] doesn’t solve the problem”.

“Everyone’s got to take a deep breath and realise we’re not there yet. We’ve got to lean into the global issue much more effectively, and get people vaccinated in the developing world and try to reduce transmissions everywhere.”

The rising case rate in Europe has led some scientists to suggest foreign holidays will be “extremely unlikely” this summer, owing to the risk of new variants being brought back into the UK.

Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group, which advises the Government, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think that international travel this summer is, for the average holidaymaker, sadly I think, extremely unlikely. I think we are running a real risk … because of the potential for bringing more of these new variants back into the country. What is really dangerous is if we jeopardise our vaccination campaign by having these variants where the vaccines don’t work as effectively spreading more rapidly.”