Coronavirus Could Be ‘Here Forever’ With Constant Need For Vaccinations, Top Scientist Warns

By Staff, Agencies

One of the world’s leading immunologists warned British MPs that Covid-19 could be “here forever”.

Sir John Bell, a distinguished scientist and regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said that the pathogen underpinning the novel virus may never be eliminated.

Giving evidence at a session of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, Sir John, 68, added that any potential coronavirus vaccine “is unlikely to have a durable effect that’ll last for a very long time”.

“So we’re going to have to have a continual cycle of vaccinations and then more disease, and more vaccinations and more disease.” Sir John told the Committee, chaired by former health secretary and Tory MP Jeremy Hunt.

Knighted for his services to medicine in 2008, the professor used polio as an example of how difficult it can be to completely suppress a disease.

“Look at how much trouble they’ve had in eliminating, for example, polio, that eradication program has been going on for 15 years and they’re still not there,” he said.

“So this [Covid-19] is going to come and go, and we’re going to get winters where we get a lot of this virus back in action.”

Sir John’s comments came less than 24 hours after the government secured early access to 90 million Covid-19 vaccine doses through partnerships with pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer.

Researchers at Oxford University also on Monday announced that a vaccine being developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca induces a strong immune response and appears to be safe.

During Tuesday’s health committee – in which MPs scrutinized ministers’ handling of the pandemic – Sir John said the government had been “asleep” to the threat of the virus.

“The fact that we were asleep to the concept that we were going to have a pandemic, I think, shame on us,” he said.