Covid vaccine ‘could not be fast-tracked’ because of low death rate
THE Chief Medical Officer said that a Covid vaccine could not be fast-tracked because the disease had a “low mortality rate” in the early days of the pandemic, messages reveal.
Prof Sir Chris Whitty told Matt Hancock and others that diseases with a mortality rate in the range of 1 per cent would need a “very safe” vaccine and that the necessary clinical trials would be a “rate-limiting step”.
He was responding to a Whatsapp message from Dominic Cummings, the then chief adviser to Boris Johnson, in February 2020 about a report saying Israeli scientists were weeks away from developing a vaccine. The issue of how quickly vaccine trials could be completed was one of the most important arguments within government during the first months of the pandemic.
Mr Cummings would later claim that the Government could “definitely” have started vaccinating the population in September 2020 – three months before the first jabs were rolled out – if it had adopted a bolder approach to trials.
To date, 144 million Covid injections have been administered in England, and a spring booster jab is to be offered to people aged 75 and over, those in care homes and the vulnerable following advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Vaccines will be offered to eligible people about six months after their latest dose, with the booster campaign in England running from April 17 to June 30.
Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at the UK Health Security Agency, said Covid was “still circulating widely” and there had been a recent increase in older people being hospitalised.
Whatsapp messages seen by The Daily Telegraph include messages sent within a group of ministers, experts and officials in the early weeks of the pandemic.
On Feb 29 2020, Mr Cummings sent a copy of a newspaper article about Israeli scientists being weeks away
from a vaccine, asking: “[Is] this report credible?” Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, replied: “Short answer is no,” adding that safety testing, small scale trials in people and then “larger efficacy trials” would take “many months” at best, and reminded the group that there was still no Zika virus vaccine despite years of work.
Sir Chris’s view was that: “There will be a lot of good vaccine candidates that enter early clinical trials in the next few months. The rate-limiting steps are late clinical trials for safety and efficacy, and then manufacturing.
“For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1 per cent) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.”
The highest mortality rate for Covid in England was recorded in April 2020, when 626 people per 100,000 were dying of the disease, or 0.6 per cent.
After subsiding over the summer of that year, it spiked again at 0.55 per cent in January 2021, before declining steadily to 0.04 per cent in January this year.
In May 2021, Mr Cummings told a Covid supercommittee of MPS that he believed it was “unarguable” that the vaccine trials process should have happened more quickly.
He told MPS: “Normally, for any kind of vaccine, obviously you have a whole testing process, which takes quite a lot of time to go through, because if you have a disease that is killing, say, 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the population, then you have to make sure that you don’t have a vaccine that kills more than that. However, for something like this, from the point of view of how human civilisation overall could have done better, I think it is unarguable what should have happened.”
He said it had taken “literally hours” for a vaccine to be invented in January 2020 and the Government should have recruited 5,000-10,000 people to take part in immediate “human challenge” trials, in which volunteers are given the vaccine and then infected with Covid to see how effective the jab is.
He suggested that “everyone takes their chances” if they take part in the trial and “if you die your family will get one million quid or whatever”.
Between September 2020 and Dec 8, 2020, when the first Covid jab was given in the UK, more than 23,000 people died with coronavirus mentioned on their death certificate.
The UK, in common with other countries, did not carry out human challenge trials before the vaccine was rolled out, partly because there was no known cure for Covid. Israel did not produce a jab more quickly than the UK, but it did roll out its vaccine programme more swiftly once it started on Dec 20 2020.