What the commentators said
You wait almost a year for a new coronavirus variant to turn up, said Paul Nuki in The Sunday Telegraph, and then three come along at once – “each a little faster, fitter and stronger” than the last. And while the UK variant led to a surge in cases and has thrown the NHS into crisis, it’s the strains from abroad that are really worrying scientists. In South Africa, variant 501.V2 has fuelled a “ferocious second wave”. And in Brazil, the P1 variant is causing “carnage” in the city of Manaus, which was thought to have reached herd immunity after a huge Covid outbreak last year. The fear, said Adam Kucharski in the FT, is that the variants could allow the virus to evade antibodies – thereby opening the door to reinfection or rendering vaccines less effective.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom, said Tom Whipple in The Times: the UK is now vaccinating 70 people every 30 seconds, with 200,000-300,000 jabs delivered daily. Only three countries in the world have vaccinated a higher proportion of their populations than Britain, which is the best performer in Europe “by some distance”. Sure, there are disparities between the pace of the roll-out in different parts of the country. But for now, it seems the vaccine story is “that British Covid-19 rarity: one where the Government appears to have underpromised and overdelivered”.
It has been an astonishing effort, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Across Britain, medics and volunteers alike have worked tirelessly to inoculate the vulnerable, administering jabs at repurposed cathedrals, sports halls and conference centres. It has been a testament to both the brilliance and the ethos of the NHS. “Sharp elbows will not get you a vaccine in Britain, and nor will a fat chequebook.” But calls for lockdown to be eased are premature, said Stephen Buranyi in the same newspaper. We’re still a long way off herd immunity, and though many elderly people are now protected, 43% of admissions of intensive care admissions since September have been people under 60. I want lockdown to end too, but we must be patient. Vaccines have handed us “a scientific bailout of historic proportions. To squander that would be unconscionable.”
What next?
To iron out regional disparities in the roll-out, vaccine doses are to be diverted to areas falling behind in inoculating the over-80s. Health Secretary Matt Hancock promised that people in that group who have yet to be vaccinated would be contacted within four weeks. Government advisers urged people not to “drop their guard” and not to increase social contact after getting the jab, as first doses may confer less protection than first thought.
The latest data from the ONS showed that about one in eight people in England had coronavirus antibodies in December – meaning much of the population remains at risk of contracting the virus.