We can’t stop variants arriving in the UK, says chief medical officer
A “WIDE portfolio” of coronavirus vaccines could be available in two years but a cautious approach is needed in the meantime, England’s chief medical officer has said.
Professor Chris Whitty also said it is not a “realistic starting point” to think any policy can completely stop the import of variants to the UK.
The top medic addressed a wide range of questions about the pandemic during a Royal Society of Medicine webinar.
While he said technology and the ability to tailor vaccines to new variants will eventually “find a way through”, there remains a level of risk before then. He said the approach is cautious “because we’ve got such a difficult situation to go through at the moment”.
But he added: “I don’t think though this should be seen as an indefinite posture, I think this is a matter of probably the next year or two whilst we understand how to do this and find a way of responding rapidly to variants.”
He said if we “scroll forward two years I think we’re going to have a very wide portfolio of vaccines”. Technology can “turn around a vaccine to a new variant incredibly fast, compared to how historically we’ve been able to do it”, he said.
He added: “So I think technology will find a way through this in the long run, but we’ve got a period of risk between now and then.”
The idea that it is possible to stop any variants of the virus being imported to the UK is “not a realistic starting point”, he said.
He told the webinar: “Anybody who believes that they can actually just put up some border policy or some overall policy that stops the possibility (of variants) completely is misunderstanding the problem completely.”
He said while R is less than 1, variants coming in “don’t have much of a foothold”, but he added that R is anticipated to rise above 1 as more things open up in the lockdown exit road map.
As for the long term, Prof Whitty repeated his assertion that coronavirus “is not going to go away”, and said the future will be about working out how to “minimise mortality whilst not maximising the economic and particularly social impacts on our fellow citizens”.