A surge vaccination campaign could be targeted at areas where there has been a rise in cases of the coronavirus variant first identified in India, Downing Street has hinted, as the prime minister admitted he was “anxious” about how quickly the variant is spreading in the UK.
One council in Lancashire, Blackburn with Darwen, said it planned to offer a jab to everyone aged over 18 from next week, to battle an outbreak of the variant. That would be well below the age of 38 that NHS England says people have to be to book a vaccine.
Boris Johnson insisted there was no reason yet to delay easing restrictions. He said the variant, which a scientist has estimated could be 60% more transmissible than the most dominant strain in the UK, had been spreading in Britain and so government advisers were gathering to “consider exactly what we need to do”.
Johnson said officials were “ruling nothing out” and did not deny that local lockdowns could return to clamp down on the variant. “There are a range of things we could do, we want to make sure we grip it,” Johnson told broadcasters.
Earlier, Downing Street was asked if the government was considering surge vaccination, involving extending access to jabs in areas where variant cases are causing concern. The prime minister’s spokesperson said: “We want to consider all options. We’re not going to rule anything out.”
India has been hit hard by the emergence of the new variant, and cases and deaths have risen to record daily highs. The country was placed on England’s travel “red list” last month but ministers were accused of not acting fast enough to stop the import of the variant.
Labour has called for hotel quarantine requirements to be widened to include more travellers in an attempt to avoid more people carrying the variant into the country via indirect routes.
The variant of concern – known as B.1.617.2 – is circulating in London and is “at least as transmissible” as the Kent variant that is now dominant across the UK, said Prof Paul Elliott, the director of the React programme at Imperial College London.
Prof Tom Wenseleers, of the University of Leuven in Belgium, who worked closely with UK scientists on the spread of the Kent variant, said the Indian variant could be 60% more transmissible than the current most widespread one.
The Foreign Office minister James Cleverly told Sky News that any decisions to delay easing restrictions would be “driven by the data” on infection rates and hospitalisations in the run-up to the next phase of the reopening.
He said: “Scientists on Sage will make their assessments, they will report that to government, and we will make decisions based on the data and the evidence that they provide. The prime minister, the health secretary, have always been clear that the easing of restrictions which allow us to get back to normality will be done at a pace and in a way which is safe.”
Prof James Naismith, of the University of Oxford, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the India variant “will get everywhere”. He said he did not believe that local restrictions would work to contain the variant, and he urged the government to tackle it as a countrywide problem.
He said: “We keep learning this lesson, but we know that this will be the case. When we tried locally having different restrictions in different regions that didn’t really make any difference. So I don’t think thinking about a localised strategy for containment will really work.”
