UK to be Covid-free by August, says jab chief
Senior architect of vaccine triumph predicts Covid will soon be unable to spread – and no booster jabs will be needed this autumn
Coronavirus will no longer be circulating among Britons by August due to the success of the vaccine programme, the outgoing taskforce chief has said. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph a week after stepping down as interim head of the vaccine taskforce, Clive Dix said: “Sometime in August, we will have no circulating virus in the UK.” He urged Britain to lead the crusade against vaccine nationalism by sharing millions of spare doses with countries in need.
When Britain decided last year to opt out of Brussels’ Covid vaccine programme and go it alone, there were howls of protest from critics who said the country was putting Brexit ideology before public health.
Roll forward 10 months, and the UK now has administered more than 51m jabs in one of the world’s most successful vaccine programmes – while Europe faced a storm of criticism for its slow start as the Continent was engulfed by a third wave.
Clive Dix, a key architect of that success, expects the country to have effectively won the battle with Covid by August and believes the success of the programme is so strong that booster jabs will not be needed until 2022.
“We did it,” says Dix, who recently stepped down as interim head of the vaccine task force, having previously worked under Kate Bingham.
“We got the Government the vaccines they needed to protect lives, and get the economy in the UK going.
“My prediction is that sometime in August, we will have no circulating virus in the UK.”
Dix – who was part of the team that struck the series of deals at the start of the pandemic when there was no certainty any vaccine candidate would be successful – expects everybody in the UK to have been vaccinated at least once by the end of July. This means the country as a whole should be safe from the disease the following month.
He is keen to downplay the risks of a rogue Covid strain overwhelming the immune defences of those who have been jabbed, saying the programme will “have probably protected the population from all the variants that are known”, meaning the country will be “safe over the coming winter”.
Dix has more than 30 years of experience in the pharma industry, in which he sold companies to the likes of Pfizer, Chiron Vaccines and Biogen, and gained knowledge and contacts that have proved invaluable.
Where the EU went into contracting mode and tried to knock pharma firms down on price, Dix says the UK team took an entrepreneurial approach.
“We just went out there and talked to the top companies and said, ‘What would it take for you to sell us the vaccine first? How can we bribe you?’”
Dix quickly corrects himself. “Not quite bribe,” he says. “But, you know, we said to them, ‘We can run clinical trials for you fast anywhere. If you need manufacturing in the UK, we can help you to build it.’ It was all done on the basis of a partnership.”
Those early deals have ultimately been key to helping propel Britain, among the hardest hit by the virus last
‘We should be encouraging the drug makers that have contracted to us, but haven’t delivered, to think about delivering that elsewhere first’
year, into now one of the best prepared to cope with Covid-19.
Having agreed tie-ups with Pfizer, Astrazeneca, Moderna, Valneva, Novavax, Curevac, Janssen and Glaxosmithkline – almost all of which developed successful vaccines – now Britain has significant vaccine supplies coming its way. Altogether, the UK has agreed deals for more than 500m doses of Covid-19 vaccine.
Yet the work has taken its toll on Dix. He has had to juggle the work with his post as chief executive of Manchester-headquartered drug research firm C4X Discovery, working seven-day weeks and extending his hours from early morning to late in the evening.
Dix is not washing his hands of the role completely. Now more able to publicly voice his views on vaccine policy decisions, he says he is desperate to see Britain do more.
Boris Johnson last month said there were no surplus vaccines to send to India, a nation that has been particularly struggling with spiralling case numbers, although said this would be kept under review.
Dix doesn’t think that is good enough. “We should be encouraging the manufacturers that have contracted to us, but haven’t delivered, to think about delivering that elsewhere first,” he says.
“Rather than saying to a manufacturer ‘when the vaccines are available, we’ll decide what happens to them’, free the manufacturers up now. The UK should be a world leader. We’ve led the world in the response, let’s lead the world on this.”
In his view, it’s a simple decision: “If my house is burning and next door’s is as well, and I manage to put mine out, do I just carry on putting out the smoulder, or do I help next door? We’re now ready to help next door.”
For the biotech industry veteran, it is not really about being able to go abroad. Having travelled all his life, he is “not interested in jumping on planes now, although not because of Covid, just because I prefer the Yorkshire Dales and the Highlands”. Instead, Dix sees it as Britain’s duty. Of course, it may be too early to suggest Britain has won the war against Covid-19. Dix may describe the dwindling Covid virus cases in Britain as a “smoulder”, but with the emergence of mutations and talk of immune responses waning, there is a concern that this could soon turn back into a raging fire.
Mutations that are most concerning, which evade the existing vaccines, will start cropping up when there’s a pressure on the virus, when it is unable to spread as easily. And this will only start happening when most of the world is vaccinated, potentially towards the end of the year, when most countries will have vaccinated their over-50s.
“We need to be ready to react at speed and produce vaccines, the speed of making these vaccines needs to be the top priority on everyone’s list,” says Dix.
The hope among the task force and the Government is that companies will be able to produce a variant vaccine within months of a mutation first being spotted. The latest deal with Curevac, agreed in February, is about making 50m doses of a jab within three months of a concerning variant being identified. Although Dix admits: “That’s the aspiration – we haven’t done it yet.”
There is still some way to go. For example, the South African variant was first identified last October and started spreading particularly rapidly earlier this year.
“But if you look at that one, we still haven’t got a vaccine for it,” he says.
“No one’s rushing, because we probably don’t need one. But it gives an idea on how long it’s currently taking.”
Now Dix has stepped down, it won’t be him making the decisions on which variants do and do not need to be tackled. It won’t be up to him to judge what next-generation vaccines need to be bought and when.
However, Dix is hopeful that Westminster will soon take a more outward-looking approach.
“I just want to see the fruits of that labour helping the world,” he says. “Not just be left to say, ‘We’ve done our bit and that’s it.’”