Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of Medicine Sir John Bell tells T&G nobody should go on a foreign holiday this summer: “I don't think anybody's going on a holiday, except in the UK. There are very broad swathes of Europe that are largely unvaccinated...
“...so they’re pretty vulnerable to new variants, be it Indian or otherwise sweeping across the continent. Having people flying around and coming back with whatever local variant they run into, that is not a good idea. Cornwall or Bournemouth is not so bad".
“I don't want to be a party pooper but the most important thing is not to prolong this any longer than we absolutely have to, so going about this cautiously could be quite helpful to everybody.”
Sir John Bell also reveals that a landmark Oxford study has found that current coronavirus vaccines work well against the Indian variant: "It looks like the Indian variant will be susceptible to the vaccine in the way that others are. The data looks rather promising".
"If you do the lab experiment, it looks okay. It's not perfect but it’s not catastrophically bad. There's a slight reduction in the ability to neutralise the virus, but it's not very great and certainly not as great as you see with the South African variant".
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
