Backlash grows over plan to quarantine travellers to UK
MINISTERS HAVE faced a growing backlash over the planned blanket quarantine for travellers to the UK after an expert questioned the Government’s claim that the scheme was “backed by science”.
Controversy over the plan continued as Boris Johnson urged world leaders to “unite humanity in the fight against disease” as he hosted an online global vaccine summit yesterday.
Almost £7bn was pledged at the event to immunise 300 million children against infectious diseases like polio, diphtheria and measles within five years.
The Prime Minister said up to eight million lives would be saved thanks to funds pledged at the Gavi vaccine alliance conference, held virtually, yesterday.
Mr Johnson urged foreign leaders to “fortify this lifesaving alliance”, telling them the “triumph of humanity over disease” is the “greatest shared endeavour of our lifetimes”.
He also used the conference, which comes against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, to ask leaders to renew their “collective resolve” to find a Covid-19 vaccine.
But the triumph came as the travel industry pressed home its message that the quarantine plan risked worsening the economic pain caused by the virus.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary said the plans would “do untold damage to British tourism”.
He said: “We don’t understand, as an industry, why the British Government doesn’t follow the European science that says it is perfectly OK to fly as long as you all wear face masks.”
He alluded to a report in The Times that the PM’s chief aide was behind the plan, telling the BBC it was “designed by Dominic Cummings for Dominic Cummings, who as we all know, doesn’t observe quarantine”.
Professor Robert Dingwall, a scientific adviser to the Government and a member of a subgroup of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said there was no evidence of new clusters of Covid-19 infection involving people who have been travelling abroad.
“I think we would really need to get the level in this country significantly further down before quarantine started to become a useful measure,” he said.
“That I think, even then, we would have to see something that is targeted on countries with a significantly higher level of community transmission than ourselves – and there aren’t too many of those around, I’m afraid.”
But the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The quarantine system is designed to keep the transmission rate down and manage the risk of new cases being brought in from abroad and to help prevent a second wave of coronavirus.
“The number of infections in the UK has been falling and – as the Home Office’s chief scientific adviser Professor John Aston has said – as the number of infections within the UK drops, we must now manage the risk of transmissions being introduced from elsewhere.”
The plan designed by Dominic Cummings for Dominic Cummings. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary.