Covid-19 will end up just causing the common cold as the virus weakens, according to a vaccine expert.
Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, who worked on the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, has said Covid-19 is unlikely to mutate into a deadlier variant.
Instead it will probably become less severe or harmful as it 'circulates through the population', The Mirror reports.
The professor, who helped make the most widely distributed Covid vaccine in the world, added: "There is no reason to think we will have a more virulent version of Sars-CoV-2".
Dame Sarah, who led the vaccine team at Oxford University's Jenner institute, said the virus which causes Covid-19 will eventually become like the coronaviruses which circulate widely and cause colds.
She told a Royal Society of Medicine seminar: "We already live with four different human coronaviruses that we don't really ever think about very much and eventually Sars-CoV-2 will become one of those.
"It's just a question of how long it's going to take to get there and what measures we're going to have to take to manage it in the meantime."
Dame Sarah's comments were echoed by Professor David Matthews, Professor of Virology at Bristol's School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
He told the Mirror: "Babies born today will probably catch it, bat it away, and by the time they're 20/30/40-years-old they'll have fought the virus and won dozens of times.
"This virus is probably not a killer in that it doesn't kill babies, where as things like flu do. It will settle down to just a common cold."
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