A Trinity Professor has said strict international travel restrictions are "absolutely essential" as Covid-19 vaccines show a "significant drop-off in efficacy" against the UK and South African variants.
Trinity Immunology Professor Kingston Mills said that the drop-off in the effectiveness of current coronavirus jabs against the new variants make strict international travel restrictions a requirement.
He said the proposed 14-day quarantine for passengers arriving from the UK and South Africa is not enough as passengers can often arrive from other countries with no record of where they were previously.
The efficacy of the NovaVax jab, which Mills described as “probably the best one on the market,” dropped by 35% against the South African variant and 10% against the UK variant
He told Newstalk: “That really tells us that the variants, particularly the South African one, are something we certainly don’t want to have in Ireland.
“We are going to be struggling to contain it much more so than the regular one - or even the UK one - with the vaccines we now have available.
“So, I think it is absolutely essential we have very strict procedures to prevent people coming in with that variant."
Prof Mills also claimed the Irish Government needs to introduce a strict system that treats all international travellers exactly the same.
“The five-day post-travel testing is a good idea when combined with testing 72 hours before departure,” he said.
“That combination will catch most of the cases and it is going to be much easier to implement than a 14-day quarantine. 14 days is a long period of time to spend in a hotel room.”
Professor Mills also commented on yesterday's heart-breaking death number as 101 people lost their lives due to the virus - the highest figure recorded in Ireland throughout the pandemic.
A further 879 cases were also announced last night.
Professor Mills said the high death toll was “staggering” but said that it was “probably inevitable” given the high cases numbers in the first month of 2021.
He said: “We are sort of seeing a peak of what happened really a month ago in terms of the beginning of a surge in cases,” he said.
“Now that the cases numbers have gone down and hospitalisation numbers are starting to go down, we should see, hopefully, less people dying in the next few weeks.”
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