Britain could face another coronavirus wave as big as the current one if lockdown restrictions were all lifted, a scientist advising the Government has said.
Professor Steven Riley, a member of the Spi-M modelling group, has said the rollout of the vaccination programme did not mean coronavirus controls could be dropped.
“No vaccine is perfect. We are certainly going to be in the situation where we can allow more infection in the community but there is a limit,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“In the short term if we were to allow a very large wave of infection, that wave will find all the people who couldn’t have the vaccine for very good reason (and) those people who had the vaccine but unfortunately it didn’t give them the protection they need.
“I think scientists are genuinely worried. We don’t want to show that it is an excellent-not-perfect vaccine by having another large wave in the UK.
“If for some reason we were to choose to just pretend it (coronavirus) wasn’t here any more then there is the potential to go back to a wave that is a similar size to the one that we are in now.”
