Hope in the post for 5m

Letters inviting over-70s for Covid jab sent out TODAY

OVER 5million more Britons will be invited to receive a coronavirus jab from today.

In a major milestone for the vaccination programme, letters will start being sent to those in England in the next two priority groups.

This includes 4.6million in their 70s plus another one million classed as ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ because they have conditions affecting the immune system, certain cancers or are organ transplant recipients.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the nation was ‘nearly on the home straight’ as 50 per cent of all over-80s in England have been vaccinated. Some 140 a minute are receiving a jab, putting Britain on course to vaccinate all adults by early autumn.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab pledged yesterday that every over-18 will be offered a first jab by September – if not earlier.

And he said he was hopeful some lockdown restrictions could start to be lifted from March. Ten new mass vaccination hubs will open today, including Blackburn Cathedral and Taunton Racecourse. In other developments:

NHS figures revealed one in six Covid-19 patients in English NHS hospitals arrived without the virus but were infected there since September;

Another 671 deaths were recorded, the

highest number for any Sunday of the pandemic so far, along with 38,598 new cases;

NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said a patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus every 30 seconds;

Ex-Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption sparked a row after telling stage 4 bowel cancer sufferer Deborah James on TV that her life was ‘ less valuable’ than other people’s;

All travellers arriving in Britain face being forced to quarantine in hotels under plans to further lock down the country’s borders;

England rugby star Maro Itoje called for every schoolchild to have a laptop as he vowed to tackle the ‘digital divide’;

Parks remained packed despite the Prime Minister warning people to ‘think twice’ before leaving the house;

Mr Raab warned the public it is ‘too early’ for them to book summer holidays for this year.

Ministers said the priority this week will still be to vaccinate the top two priority groups, made up of care home residents and staff, the over-80s, and NHS workers.

More than 3.8million have received their first vaccine dose so far. But NHS sites which have spare capacity will be allowed to offer jabs to those aged over 70 and those who are ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’.

Boris Johnson has promised the first four priority groups will all have received the jab by the middle of February.

The PM said: ‘Today is a significant milestone in our vaccination programme as we open it up to millions more who are most at risk from Covid-19. We are now delivering the vaccine at a rate of 140 jabs a minute and I want to thank everyone involved in this national effort.

‘We have a long way to go and there will doubtless be challenges ahead – but by working together we are makcent ing huge progress in our fight against this virus.’

Mr Hancock added: ‘ Now that more than half of all over80s have had their jab, we can begin vaccinating the next most vulnerable groups.

‘Where an area has already reached the vast majority of groups one and two, they can now start opening up the programme to groups three and four.

‘We are working day and night to make sure everyone who is 70 and over, our health and social care workers and the clinically extremely vulnerable are offered the vaccine by the middle of February and our NHS heroes are making huge strides in making this happen.’ Mr Raab said yesterday it would be ‘great’ if the rollout could be faster amid reports that the target of offering everyone in the UK the jab could be met by June, but said the Government was working to the early autumn target.

‘Our target is by September to have offered all the adult population a first dose. If we can do it faster than that, great, but that’s the roadmap,’ he told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday.

Mr Raab said the Government hoped 88 per cent of those most at risk of dying from coronavirus would receive their first jab by the middle of February, with 99 per of those at greatest risk protected by the early spring.

He suggested lockdown restrictions could then be eased – with a possible return to the tiered system. ‘I think it is fair to say it won’t be a big bang, if you like, it will be done phased, possibly back through the tiered approach,’ he told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show.

Asked if vaccine supplies are sufficient for someone to get their second dose within 12 weeks, he said ‘we ought to’ be able to deliver.

Sir Simon Stevens said staff were jabbing ‘four times faster’ than people are newly catching the virus.

He also predicted lockdown could be eased ‘gradually’ around spring and summer time. However, he said this would depend on the effect of new variants of coronavirus.

A new strain found in the UK that is more transmissible than previous types is rapidly spreading across the country, and variants found in Brazil and South Africa are also being viewed with concern by virologists in case they are more resistant to vaccines.

As DEATHS from Covid-19 in our hospitals reach a new high, while the country endures a third lockdown in the dispiriting cold and damp of a British winter, we need a boost to our national self-belief.

As it happens, there is a genuine reason to feel such positive emotion — and, believe it or not, it has everything to do with our performance over the virus.

This will seem odd to many British people: not only because of dilatory action by the Government but also because of our demography, the UK has suffered one of the very worst fatality rates, per capita, from the disease.

Yet in our contribution to the treatment of this plague, Britain leads the world.

I am not indulging in mere chauvinism: this is recognised beyond our shores. The American economist, Tyler Cowen, whose Marginal Revolution blog is respected across the globe, wrote an article entitled ‘The UK’s response to Covid has been world class’.

Cowen declared: ‘ At first glance, the UK’s performance doesn’t look great. It has one of the highest death rates per million and its Government’s initial response to Covid-19 was halting and contradictory. That said, the most important factor in the global response to Covid-19 has to be progress on the biomedical front and on that score the UK receives stellar marks. In fact, I would argue, it is tops in the world.’

Hunch

Exhibit A in Cowen’s case is that the UK was the trailblazer in demonstrating the effectiveness of the steroid dexamethasone, which was shown to reduce deaths among the most desperately ill by a third. And, because it is so cheap, it has been taken up by poorer nations across the planet. As Cowen writes (in true American style): ‘It is fair to call this achievement a home run.’

This was not a lucky strike. It arose because of a strategic decision — taken at pace, in March — to launch what was called the Recovery Trial.

The outcome of a discussion between the Oxford University professor of medicine and epidemiology Martin Landray and Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, this recruited tens of thousands of NHs patients into a trial of various experimental remedies.

The point was that until proper testing at scale was done, and the results analysed, treatment of very ill Covid patients with novel methods would be hit or miss, based, sometimes, on little more than hunch or advocacy.

so, for example, President Trump influentially lauded the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a ‘game changer’ (this was before he expounded on the benefits of bleach injections). But the Recovery Trial showed there was no detectable better outcome in the group of NHs patients who were given the drug, compared with those who weren’t.

such trials are as vital in proving what doesn’t help, as much as in showing, statistically, what does.

An example of the former was how the Recovery Trial demonstrated that injections of blood plasma from recovered Covid patients into those very ill with the disease had no observable benefit.

It was a blow to that wing of the Recovery Trial, which was closed down, yet vital information, again, of worldwide benefit. But as Professor Landray told The Times science correspondent Rhys Blakely, the Recovery Trial testing of dexamethasone was ‘a beautiful result’. It is estimated to have saved one and half million lives around the planet so far.

Then there is the extraordinary work of the British Genomics industry, which, as the Policy Exchange think-tank noted in a paper last week, is another world-leader in dealing with the coronavirus — and especially vital, now, in identifying variations and mutations.

The paper, discussing the so-called ‘Kent’ variant (known to scientists as ‘B117’), notes: ‘It was only due to a commitment by the UK Genomics Consortium to sequence one in 20 infections that the variant was picked up as quickly as it was. The UK has in total sequenced more than 170,000 virus mutations to date — staggeringly, this equates to about 50 per cent of all those sequenced worldwide.’

Again, this is recognised in the U.s. Its Atlantic magazine, in a lengthy investigation last week of the risks of Covid-19 mutation, quoted an American scientist in this field complaining that ‘we do not know if a city like New York would be devastated’ by a new variant. ‘sequencing is the most important thing,’ he said. ‘ We don’t have a big organised project like the UK.’

Unique

Yet there is one UK achievement still more important — and that, too, has its roots at Oxford University: a cheap, reliable vaccine, suitable for not just this country but for poorer nations where storage and transportation at ultra-low temperatures (required for the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine) is less feasible.

The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine can be kept in an ordinary refrigerator. And it was a condition of Oxford’s Jenner Institute (acknowledged as the world leader in coronavirus vaccine research even before Covid-19 appeared) that any pharmaceutical firm which wanted to be its commercial partner should offer the product at no more than cost price in the UK and the rest of the developed world while the pandemic is rife, and at cost price in perpetuity to poorer nations. It was the Anglo-swedish company AstraZeneca which came up to that mark.

The executive director of the Foundation of Vaccine Research in Washington DC, Peter Hale, is another American expert who hails Oxford’s unique contribution. In November, he told the Financial Times: ‘They were first out of the gate of the coronavirus research back in January 2020 and have kept their frontrunner status. I consider them “the little engine that could”.’

Now, millions of Britons are being given the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine (alongside the much more expensive Pfizer one). Yet the EU has still not approved it for use, and, in general, its vaccine strategy has been lumbering and over-bureaucratic compared with ours.

Last spring, the Observer ran a story, based on a letter sent to them by various academics and lawyers attacking our Government’s decision to go it alone, with the headline, ‘Brexit means coronavirus vaccine will be slower to reach the UK’.

Sour

In July, when the Health secretary Matt Hancock announced definitively that the UK would be buying and regulating Covid vaccines outside the EU’s system, the Guardian reflected the outrage of some Labour and Lib Dem MPs with the headline ‘UK plan to shun EU vaccine scheme “unforgiveable” say critics’.

They now look ridiculous. Thanks to the astute purchasing policy of the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce, headed by one of Britain’s most successful investors in biotechnology, Kate Bingham, we have got many more doses per capita, and more quickly, than the citizens of the EU.

And thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our own Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to streamline its processes but without taking a single shortcut, approval for the Pfizer vaccine came more quickly than it did from the EU medical regulator. (That would have been even more delayed, but for belated outrage by German politicians, since it was actually invented by German scientists.)

As for the remark by the Belgian deputy prime minister, Petra De sutter, that the UK is ‘vaccinating people with vaccines that do not have the same standard as the ones we use’, that untruth was just sour grapes.

And as the UK’s vaccine roll-out leaves the EU trailing (nowhere more so than France, where ‘anti-vax’ sentiment is far more dangerously prevalent than here), Britons can feel, on an individual and personal level, that our own Government has done the right thing over Covid-19, for all the missteps of the past year.

I can do no better than end with the concluding words of Tyler Cowen, in his praise for the overall contribution of our scientists, researchers and, yes, policymakers: ‘Critics of Brexit like to say that it will leave the UK as a small country of minor import. Maybe so. In the meantime, the Brits are on track to save the world.’