I hope you're correct.

My view remains lockdown and vaccination will be proven to be an entirely counterproductive strategy. Still got 3 to 4 years of this crisis left to run?

Hopefully I'm wrong.

Total insanity.

So pretty much par for the course these days.

If you ever want people to accept living indefinitely with Covid 19. You need to restrict testing to only the vulnerable part of the population.

Because further research has already shown that whilst they're effective against the original variant of SARS-CoV 2, at least for short periods of time. They're much less efficacious or not efficacious at all against newer variants. Hence SA pulling the plug on the OX AZ vaccine.

Either way we end lock-down though because if vaccination actually works great, and if it doesn't there is no more reason to lock-down.

What do you imagine will stop lockdown 5,6, 7 and so on ad infinitum?

What stops SARS COV 2 circulating in any kind of return to normal life?

The core point is that lockdown never made any sense for a virus like SARS CoV 2. It will keep on coming indefinitely and there is little we can do.

For a virus like SARS CoV 2003 it made sense as only spread symptomatically had was 100x more lethal. Therefore it was quite easy to stamp it out with a short lockdown.

The truth is we've got this wrong from day one.

We'll know how well vaccines work in real world usage 6 months or so after the resumption of normal life.

Presume they aren't effective would we then lockdown again? What after all, would be the point?

That is the huge potential problem with lockdown as a policy, potentially it doesn't go anywhere other than more lockdown and a catastrophic economic collapse.

Variants are simply evolving spontaneously within the UK, there is already hard evidence of this from Kent and Bristol.

It's just another misconception, that variants must originate from somewhere else. Stemming from the moronic geographic naming of clades as the "South Africa", "Brazil" or whatever variant.

I would encourage Professor Spector to read Andrew F. Read's work from 2015 on this subject.

Yes, in the phase 3 trials efficacy data released so far (Moderna and Pfizer) was measured at 14 and 7 days after the booster shot only. Not in real world conditions. It's really remarkable to me that any government or scientist took them at face value.

We are already seeing evolution past first wave vaccines, both spontaneous here in the UK (Kent adding 484K, Bristol etc) and in variants from abroad (SA, Brazil etc). I can't see what stops that continuing. More so if you have a functioning economy where people have to be in close contact for it to function.

I expect within 6 months or sooner we simply see natural selection produce further variants that first wave vaccines offer little protection to. Big question for me is if applying wide evolutionary pressure speeds that process up or not.

It seems the government are at least aware of this and are seemingly planning "booster shots" in the Autumn from PMQ this week. There is no guarantee of how effective or not those will be.

Most of the deaths from COVID-19 also occur in people who are immunocompromised in some way and for whom vaccination of any kind therefore doesn't work well.

Unlocking, without having a plan to deal with much higher than 2019 rates of hospitalisation (more like 1993), simply makes it inevitable we end up locking down again.

You presume it's possible to ease restrictions at any pace and not end up at square one. I believe that is incorrect.

Until we have the hospital capacity to deal with the extra demand from the permanent presence of COVID-19. We will always end up back at square one in lockdown 6 months or before after unlocking.

What stops a new variant simply taking hold and us being back under lockdown in 6 months or sooner?

Have we expanded the capacity of appropriate NHS beds or do we at least have a plan to deal with that scenario? If not what is the plan?