Boris Johnson: (31:15) Gordon Rayner, Telegraph.
Gordon Rayner: (31:19)
Thank you. Thank you, Prime minister. In a video posted online this afternoon, the health secretary told travel agents that the South African strain could be 50% more resistant to the vaccine than the original variant and that allowing it into the country would take us back to square one. Is that correct? And does that affect the decision you’re going to take soon about whether to close our borders to all foreign travelers?
(31:48)
And just quickly for Sir Patrick, in the nerve type study that you referred to earlier, I believe one of the universities, Exeter University, found that the new strain could be 91% more deadly than the original strain. I just wondered if you could address the discrepancies there between the different universities that studied it?
Boris Johnson: (32:13)
Gordon, I’ll just come back quickly on what we’re doing to protect our borders and to make sure that we stop arrivals. We stopped people coming in from South Africa, for non-UK nationals coming in from South Africa on the 24th of December. Our general policy to the world is that anybody coming in now has to test within 72 hours of flying, you have to produce a passenger locator form, and that the airline must ask you to produce both of those things and will kick you off the plane if you don’t have it. You then have to quarantine for 10 days, once you arrive, or five days if you get a second test. We’re actively taking some pretty rigorous measures to ensure that people do in fact quarantine.
Boris Johnson: (33:10)
I really don’t rule out that we may need to take further measures still, Gordon. We may need to go further to protect our borders because we do not want after all the effort that we’re going to in this country, the massive effort, the success that the NHS and the others are having in vaccinating 5.4 million people, as they’ve done, 400,000 just in one day, we don’t want to put that at risk by having a new variant come back in.(33:43) As to the details of the changes implied by the South African variant, its resistance to the vaccine or otherwise, I’m going to ask Patrick to comment.
Patrick: (33:58)
Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m going to be a bore about this because these are difficult laboratory studies and people are trying to look at how effectively antibodies neutralize various forms of the virus or various parts of viruses, and they’ll get different results in different laboratories. Not all of the immune response is an antibody response. Taking a result from a laboratory and saying, “Therefore, the vaccine will be 50% less effective,” you just can’t do it. We’re going to see different results coming up on all of these.34:34)
Ultimately, it’s going to be clinical data that’s going to tell us, and we aren’t going to get clinical data because there’s vaccination occurring in South Africa, there’s vaccination occurring in Brazil. We will find out how effective the vaccines are against this. It is the case that both the South African and Brazilian identified variants have more differences in shape, which might mean that they are recognized differently by antibodies and therefore the laboratory studies are suggesting a decreased binding. But I think it’s too early to know the effect that will have on the vaccination in people. It’s worth remembering that the response of the vaccine is very, very high antibody levels, so that may overcome some of this. We don’t know is the answer, but there’s obviously a cause for concern.(35:24)
In terms of your comment about one of the papers, it’s worth looking at all of the papers that came to the NERVTAG group, some of them suggested no increase in mortality at all. There’s a range of things, and as I’ve said, there’s also data from hospitals showing there’s no difference in outcome in patients in hospital, so there’s a range of data. The reason we have an expert group like NERVTAG to bring together people from different disciplines to look at this is try to come out with what they think is probably the most likely. At the moment, what they have said is there’s a realistic possibility that there could be an increase in mortality. That looks like, as I said, if you- (36:03)… in mortality. And that looks like, as I said, if you were to take somebody in their 60s who might have 10 out of 1,000 people who are infected might die, that would change it to 13 or 14 out of 1,000. That’s a sort of figure, but there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot more work that needs to go on. I really urge against just picking the highest number and assuming that’s correct. I don’t think that’s the case at all.
Chris: (36:26)
I’ll just add one point to what Patrick has just said, and that is that there are very many vaccines, which even if they don’t protect from infection can prevent severe disease. So it is possible we don’t know this, but what we could end up with is that the current vaccines still protect to a large degree against severe disease and dying even if they are less effective against an infection because of the change. We don’t know this, but that’s certainly entirely in keeping with some other vaccine. So vaccination against severe disease is often more effective than vaccination just against infection. And the first thing you’re probably going to lose is vaccination against infection.
Patrick: (37:04)
And the key thing is get these vaccines out there and measure, measure, measure, and assess what we’re doing.
Boris Johnson: (37:10)
Thanks Gordon. Thanks [inaudible 00:37:11]. Peter Walker of the Guardian.
Peter Walker: (37:12)
Thank you very much. Prime Minister, you’ve struck quite a cautious note, but at the same time, people are going to look at the vaccination figures and think, well, if we vaccinate all the vulnerable people quite soon, then life could return to normal by Easter, maybe a month or two after that. But scientists this week have been very, very strong in saying that lockdown measures would have to be lifted very gradually, and the mitigation measures might need to be in place for quite some time. Do you think the British public are ready for quite how long it could take? And for Sir Patrick or Professor Whitty? Do you also agree that we could have mitigation measures in for quite a long time?
Boris Johnson: (37:53)
Well, Peter, I think that we will have to live with coronavirus in one way or another for a long while to come. I think that it is an open question as to when and in what way we can start to relax any of the measures. And it depends entirely, as I said earlier on, on lots of different things. It depends on the vaccine rollout continuing to go well. It depends on there being no further discoveries about what new variants can do. It depends most of all on getting the overall incidents down to a level from which it can’t just take off again in the way that we’ve seen it do before.
(38:39)
We’ll look at things continuously. Obviously, we want to do everything we can to open up, but only safely, only cautiously. And I think that that is my view, that is overwhelmingly what the British public want. And I also think that British public and British business, we would much rather we opened safely and cautiously when it was right to do so rather than opening up again and then being forced to close back down simply because the virus takes off again.
(39:12)
And do you see what I mean? I think that is a far more sensible approach. That doesn’t mean I’m not optimistic about the rollout of the vaccine and the amazing pace at which it’s happening, the change that could mean, that could mean, but at this stage you’ve really got to be very, very cautious indeed. And I should just to add by the way that the first thing that we want to be able to reopen, if we can make any progress will of course be schools, and that remains the priority.
Patrick: (39:48)
I don’t think this virus is going anywhere. It’s going to stay around. And therefore the answer is it’s going to be around, I think probably forever as a virus, but it will be controlled. And there is remarkable progress occurring now. The vaccines are being rolled out at an unprecedented pace. We’ve got more vaccines than we could ever have dreamt over a year ago. The idea that we’ve got many vaccines coming through the pipeline is incredibly important, including ones that we can alter as needs be.
(40:18)
And there are new medicines coming along, including specific antiviral drugs which will be going into the clinic over the course of this year. So I think there’s a very different outlook as we go through the year. The key thing I think is to keep watching, measuring and assessing where we are and not getting too hooked up on specific dates because we don’t know at the moment. We need to watch, weight, measure and release carefully as we go through. Would be our advice, Chris [inaudible 00:00:40:46].
Chris: (40:47) I completely agree with the PM and Patrick.
Boris Johnson: (40:49)Thanks very much, Peter. Tim Ross, Bloomberg.
Tim Ross: (40:54)
Question two, Patrick Vallance and Chris Witty. SAGE minutes from a meeting on January the seventh say there’s an unquantifiable, but likely small probability of the delayed second dose generating a vaccine resistant mutation. In layman’s terms, does that mean that the decision to delay the second dose actually risks making the virus itself more dangerous? And if so, what are you doing about that? And the question to the Prime Minister, you mentioned businesses wanting to avoid the cycle of lock downs and unlocking again, but the furlough program is due to come to an end at the end of April. Can you at least now give some reassurance that you will continue further or consider continuing furlough after that point if restrictions are still in place?
Patrick: (41:38)
The most risky thing in terms of new mutations is to have very high prevalence. The more the virus is replicating and transmitting between people, the likely, the more the chance that it will get a mutation and alter, and that’s what’s happening around world. And that’s why we’re seeing the same mutations pop up everywhere. So these mutations have not come about because of vaccine pressure or anything else. They seem to be mutations that the virus accumulates naturally during replication as it wants to get more efficient at transmitting. And so I think that’s the biggest risk.(42:19)
There’s always some risk if you start to have partial immunity, but there’s also a benefit, which is partial immunity can actually stop the infection quicker. And so I think that was a statement from the immunologists and appropriately cautious one, but I don’t think it’s the biggest risk.
Chris: (42:36)
All of medicine is about balance of risk. And it is important we consider the risks on both sides and we don’t try and just only look at the positive sides than the course of action, we look at both sides. That’s what SAGE is doing. That’s what we’ve tried to do in all the decisions we’ve taken. Our overall view was the balance of risk was firmly in favor at this stage of the epidemic in the UK of having many more people vaccinated. But that does mean the delay, but I think most people would agree that the risk that was identified, that particular risk, was a relatively much smaller risk than the risk of not having people vaccinated, which essentially was the alternative.
Boris Johnson: (43:13)
Tim, and on your point about support for business and for jobs, we’ll do whatever it takes to support the people of this country throughout this pandemic. Support jobs, support livelihoods as we have done throughout. But obviously the faster we can roll out the vaccine, the faster we can get on with giving businesses what they really want, which is a certainty about being able to resume something like life and businesses as usual. But getting that depends as I think, has being a pretty consistent message this afternoon. Getting that depends on our ability, not just to roll out the vaccine, but also to make sure that we work together to get the infection rate down, and that means obeying the rules today. Stay at home, protecting the NHS, saving lives. Thank you all very much. Thank you.
Gordon Rayner: (31:19)
Thank you. Thank you, Prime minister. In a video posted online this afternoon, the health secretary told travel agents that the South African strain could be 50% more resistant to the vaccine than the original variant and that allowing it into the country would take us back to square one. Is that correct? And does that affect the decision you’re going to take soon about whether to close our borders to all foreign travelers?
(31:48)
And just quickly for Sir Patrick, in the nerve type study that you referred to earlier, I believe one of the universities, Exeter University, found that the new strain could be 91% more deadly than the original strain. I just wondered if you could address the discrepancies there between the different universities that studied it?
Boris Johnson: (32:13)
Gordon, I’ll just come back quickly on what we’re doing to protect our borders and to make sure that we stop arrivals. We stopped people coming in from South Africa, for non-UK nationals coming in from South Africa on the 24th of December. Our general policy to the world is that anybody coming in now has to test within 72 hours of flying, you have to produce a passenger locator form, and that the airline must ask you to produce both of those things and will kick you off the plane if you don’t have it. You then have to quarantine for 10 days, once you arrive, or five days if you get a second test. We’re actively taking some pretty rigorous measures to ensure that people do in fact quarantine.
Boris Johnson: (33:10)
I really don’t rule out that we may need to take further measures still, Gordon. We may need to go further to protect our borders because we do not want after all the effort that we’re going to in this country, the massive effort, the success that the NHS and the others are having in vaccinating 5.4 million people, as they’ve done, 400,000 just in one day, we don’t want to put that at risk by having a new variant come back in.(33:43) As to the details of the changes implied by the South African variant, its resistance to the vaccine or otherwise, I’m going to ask Patrick to comment.
Patrick: (33:58)
Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m going to be a bore about this because these are difficult laboratory studies and people are trying to look at how effectively antibodies neutralize various forms of the virus or various parts of viruses, and they’ll get different results in different laboratories. Not all of the immune response is an antibody response. Taking a result from a laboratory and saying, “Therefore, the vaccine will be 50% less effective,” you just can’t do it. We’re going to see different results coming up on all of these.34:34)
Ultimately, it’s going to be clinical data that’s going to tell us, and we aren’t going to get clinical data because there’s vaccination occurring in South Africa, there’s vaccination occurring in Brazil. We will find out how effective the vaccines are against this. It is the case that both the South African and Brazilian identified variants have more differences in shape, which might mean that they are recognized differently by antibodies and therefore the laboratory studies are suggesting a decreased binding. But I think it’s too early to know the effect that will have on the vaccination in people. It’s worth remembering that the response of the vaccine is very, very high antibody levels, so that may overcome some of this. We don’t know is the answer, but there’s obviously a cause for concern.(35:24)
In terms of your comment about one of the papers, it’s worth looking at all of the papers that came to the NERVTAG group, some of them suggested no increase in mortality at all. There’s a range of things, and as I’ve said, there’s also data from hospitals showing there’s no difference in outcome in patients in hospital, so there’s a range of data. The reason we have an expert group like NERVTAG to bring together people from different disciplines to look at this is try to come out with what they think is probably the most likely. At the moment, what they have said is there’s a realistic possibility that there could be an increase in mortality. That looks like, as I said, if you- (36:03)… in mortality. And that looks like, as I said, if you were to take somebody in their 60s who might have 10 out of 1,000 people who are infected might die, that would change it to 13 or 14 out of 1,000. That’s a sort of figure, but there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot more work that needs to go on. I really urge against just picking the highest number and assuming that’s correct. I don’t think that’s the case at all.
Chris: (36:26)
I’ll just add one point to what Patrick has just said, and that is that there are very many vaccines, which even if they don’t protect from infection can prevent severe disease. So it is possible we don’t know this, but what we could end up with is that the current vaccines still protect to a large degree against severe disease and dying even if they are less effective against an infection because of the change. We don’t know this, but that’s certainly entirely in keeping with some other vaccine. So vaccination against severe disease is often more effective than vaccination just against infection. And the first thing you’re probably going to lose is vaccination against infection.
Patrick: (37:04)
And the key thing is get these vaccines out there and measure, measure, measure, and assess what we’re doing.
Boris Johnson: (37:10)
Thanks Gordon. Thanks [inaudible 00:37:11]. Peter Walker of the Guardian.
Peter Walker: (37:12)
Thank you very much. Prime Minister, you’ve struck quite a cautious note, but at the same time, people are going to look at the vaccination figures and think, well, if we vaccinate all the vulnerable people quite soon, then life could return to normal by Easter, maybe a month or two after that. But scientists this week have been very, very strong in saying that lockdown measures would have to be lifted very gradually, and the mitigation measures might need to be in place for quite some time. Do you think the British public are ready for quite how long it could take? And for Sir Patrick or Professor Whitty? Do you also agree that we could have mitigation measures in for quite a long time?
Boris Johnson: (37:53)
Well, Peter, I think that we will have to live with coronavirus in one way or another for a long while to come. I think that it is an open question as to when and in what way we can start to relax any of the measures. And it depends entirely, as I said earlier on, on lots of different things. It depends on the vaccine rollout continuing to go well. It depends on there being no further discoveries about what new variants can do. It depends most of all on getting the overall incidents down to a level from which it can’t just take off again in the way that we’ve seen it do before.
(38:39)
We’ll look at things continuously. Obviously, we want to do everything we can to open up, but only safely, only cautiously. And I think that that is my view, that is overwhelmingly what the British public want. And I also think that British public and British business, we would much rather we opened safely and cautiously when it was right to do so rather than opening up again and then being forced to close back down simply because the virus takes off again.
(39:12)
And do you see what I mean? I think that is a far more sensible approach. That doesn’t mean I’m not optimistic about the rollout of the vaccine and the amazing pace at which it’s happening, the change that could mean, that could mean, but at this stage you’ve really got to be very, very cautious indeed. And I should just to add by the way that the first thing that we want to be able to reopen, if we can make any progress will of course be schools, and that remains the priority.
Patrick: (39:48)
I don’t think this virus is going anywhere. It’s going to stay around. And therefore the answer is it’s going to be around, I think probably forever as a virus, but it will be controlled. And there is remarkable progress occurring now. The vaccines are being rolled out at an unprecedented pace. We’ve got more vaccines than we could ever have dreamt over a year ago. The idea that we’ve got many vaccines coming through the pipeline is incredibly important, including ones that we can alter as needs be.
(40:18)
And there are new medicines coming along, including specific antiviral drugs which will be going into the clinic over the course of this year. So I think there’s a very different outlook as we go through the year. The key thing I think is to keep watching, measuring and assessing where we are and not getting too hooked up on specific dates because we don’t know at the moment. We need to watch, weight, measure and release carefully as we go through. Would be our advice, Chris [inaudible 00:00:40:46].
Chris: (40:47) I completely agree with the PM and Patrick.
Boris Johnson: (40:49)Thanks very much, Peter. Tim Ross, Bloomberg.
Tim Ross: (40:54)
Question two, Patrick Vallance and Chris Witty. SAGE minutes from a meeting on January the seventh say there’s an unquantifiable, but likely small probability of the delayed second dose generating a vaccine resistant mutation. In layman’s terms, does that mean that the decision to delay the second dose actually risks making the virus itself more dangerous? And if so, what are you doing about that? And the question to the Prime Minister, you mentioned businesses wanting to avoid the cycle of lock downs and unlocking again, but the furlough program is due to come to an end at the end of April. Can you at least now give some reassurance that you will continue further or consider continuing furlough after that point if restrictions are still in place?
Patrick: (41:38)
The most risky thing in terms of new mutations is to have very high prevalence. The more the virus is replicating and transmitting between people, the likely, the more the chance that it will get a mutation and alter, and that’s what’s happening around world. And that’s why we’re seeing the same mutations pop up everywhere. So these mutations have not come about because of vaccine pressure or anything else. They seem to be mutations that the virus accumulates naturally during replication as it wants to get more efficient at transmitting. And so I think that’s the biggest risk.(42:19)
There’s always some risk if you start to have partial immunity, but there’s also a benefit, which is partial immunity can actually stop the infection quicker. And so I think that was a statement from the immunologists and appropriately cautious one, but I don’t think it’s the biggest risk.
Chris: (42:36)
All of medicine is about balance of risk. And it is important we consider the risks on both sides and we don’t try and just only look at the positive sides than the course of action, we look at both sides. That’s what SAGE is doing. That’s what we’ve tried to do in all the decisions we’ve taken. Our overall view was the balance of risk was firmly in favor at this stage of the epidemic in the UK of having many more people vaccinated. But that does mean the delay, but I think most people would agree that the risk that was identified, that particular risk, was a relatively much smaller risk than the risk of not having people vaccinated, which essentially was the alternative.
Boris Johnson: (43:13)
Tim, and on your point about support for business and for jobs, we’ll do whatever it takes to support the people of this country throughout this pandemic. Support jobs, support livelihoods as we have done throughout. But obviously the faster we can roll out the vaccine, the faster we can get on with giving businesses what they really want, which is a certainty about being able to resume something like life and businesses as usual. But getting that depends as I think, has being a pretty consistent message this afternoon. Getting that depends on our ability, not just to roll out the vaccine, but also to make sure that we work together to get the infection rate down, and that means obeying the rules today. Stay at home, protecting the NHS, saving lives. Thank you all very much. Thank you.
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