Speaking from a vaccination centre in South London this morning, the Prime Minister effectively rejected the demand from 63 Covid Recovery Group MPs to reopen the country once JCVI groups 1-9 have been vaccinated. Saying that the prevalence of the virus has to be much lower in order to avoid vaccination work being undone, Boris explained: 

“If you have a large volume of circulation – if you have loads of people, even young people, getting the disease then a couple of things happen. First of all you have a higher risk of new variants – mutations – within the population where the disease is circulating. Secondly there will be a greater risk of the disease spreading out into the older groups again. Although the vaccines are effective and great, of course no vaccination programme is 100% effective.”

The two pronged risk of general circulation leading to vaccine resistant mutations and finding its way to some of those who have been vaccinated can be overcome by reaching herd immunity. Once enough of the population is vaccinated to a herd immunity level, small outbreaks will fizzle out before they can become endemic, unable to find new susceptible hosts…

Boris went on to say that “if we possibly can we’ll be setting out dates… by which we hope we can do something at the earliest” saying people would much rather see a plan that is “cautious but irreversible.” The roadmap is set to look like the one we saw back in May, although hopefully less reversible…