Good Morning Britain's Dr Hilary Jones has warned the pandemic could last longer than we anticipate, amid upcoming delays in the UK's vaccination programme.
The EU may ban exports of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the UK over concerns it causes blood clots, which may slow down the rollout of vaccines.
Dr Hilary explained: "There are new variants, there are surges, people are ignoring social distancing rules.
"In France, they're in real trouble with ITU units full, in Italy, they've got almost full lockdown in most areas.
"Germany are concerned about another lockdown having to be imposed, so there's certainly no room for complacency.
"What we have here is a virus here that hasn't changed particularly except for with new variants, so it's still very transmissible and it's still quite lethal for some people."
He continued: "We mustn't rely completely on vaccination, we've done brilliantly well with a record number of vaccinations - over 800,000 in one day.
"The equivalent of vaccinating the whole cities of Southampton, Oxford and Liverpool in one day."
"But vaccination is not going to be the only way out of this, we are still going to have to abide by restrictions and regulations for some time.
"This is a global pandemic. This is going to affect every population in the same way and whilst we have done extremely well we do have a pretty tired NHS work force to say the least, exhausted I would say.
"We've still got a large number of people on ventilators, we've still seeing 5,500 new cases testing positive a day and that's just the ones we are testing. We are certainly not out of the woods yet."
The Government has warned the European Commission to "grow up" over the row, and Labour leader Keir Starmer told LBC Radio: “I don't think the EU is helping itself here. I don't think it's helped itself much in the last few weeks and months on the whole question of vaccine.
“And I don't think they should go down this road of banning exports.
“What we want is this resolved as quickly as possible, because we don't want any shortage in vaccines to interrupt the rollout in this country. And where contracts have been signed they need to be honoured.”
* Good Morning Britain airs weekdays on ITV at 6am
