Britain’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic led to more deaths, Commons inquiry finds; Thailand to drop mandatory quarantine for UK and US visitors
- WHO recommends extra jab for immunocompromised people
- UK records 40,224 new infections as well as 28 further deaths
- French study of 22m people finds vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%
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Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide will die needlessly from Covid this autumn as wealthy nations prioritise booster shots for their own “highly protected” people instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group has warned.
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said that while it was “possible” a third dose might help protect some people, the “potential benefit” for the vast majority was “small” because most double jabbed people were already “highly protected” against Covid-19.
At the time the concern was if we locked down too soon, there wouldn’t be a willingness to lock down for a long period of time. Now we actually know now that actually there was a willingness of the British public to lock down for far longer than we envisaged.
There was was rigorous debate within government with science, but of course it was unprecedented, so it was a developing picture for the scientists themselves.
The principal concern at the time was around this surge of patients in the NHS, the concern around delayed discharge, and how that would lock up the capacity of the NHS. The understanding around asymptomatic infection was very different. We didn’t have the testing regime that we now have that had to be built from a standing start.