Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, says the UK is “going to have to live with” Covid-19.
Speaking to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, Prof Pollard says “variants and their emergence” will “continue to happen”.
“But in the end, we’re going to have to come back to focusing on the really important public health issue, which is the hospitalisation and the death,” he adds.
“If transmission is disconnected by vaccine immunity from the severe disease, to a large extent, then we’ll need to monitor new variants, perhaps, if we need to find new vaccines and so on – but we are going to have to live with it being in in our communities and transmitting.”
