UK in ‘very strong position’ in fight against Covid, health expert says

The UK is in a strong position in the fight against Covid due to successful vaccine rollouts and high degrees of natural immunity, a health expert has said.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and former SAGE advisor, was speaking to Sky News ahead of Boris Johnson announcing he would be lifting plan B measures in England.

Mr Johnson said in a statement to the Commons that data suggested the Omicron variant had “peaked nationally”.

Sir Jeremy said: “I think, particularly in the UK, we can be cautiously optimistic.

“I don’t think Omicron will be the last variant – this virus remains very plastic; it will continue to evolve and it will continue to change around the world. But the UK, in particular, and some other countries are in a very, very strong position now."

However, Sir Jeremy said that the rest of the world remains in a “pretty dire situation” due to lower vaccination rates and the rapid spread of the variant.

Sir Jeremy said that increasing availability of vaccines around the world – with a goal of another 20 billion doses becoming available globally in 2022 – must be prioritised.

“If you think there are seven billion people or so in the world, we should now in the first half of 2022, be able to get vaccines to everybody that wants it in every country in the world, and that has got to be our target in the first half of this year," he said.

The Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation have pledged a total of $300m (£221m) for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is helping in making coronavirus vaccines more accessible to poorer countries and working on developing more "variant-proof" vaccines to prevent future coronavirus pandemics.