‘Main exit strategy’ on Covid-19 is not certain to ever materialise, warns Gove
Government ministers and their chief scientific adviser have warned that there are no guarantees that there will ever be a safe and efficacious vaccine against Covid-19.
The comments come after vaccine has been widely labelled as the ultimate way to defeat the coronavirus and to exit lockdowns across the globe, and as dozens of teams race to develop one, including four teams in the UK.
Michael Gove told the Andrew Marr show on 19 April that securing a vaccine would be “a significant breakthrough” and that the government is “investing in making sure that we can get one as quickly as possible”.
But he added that “I do not think it is the case that anyone should automatically assume that a vaccine is a dead cert to come soon…It is the case, of course, that there are some conditions, some diseases, for which no vaccine has yet been developed.”
His words echo those of business secretary Alok Sharma and chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, both of whom have warned against too much hope being pinned on any one vaccine candidate.
“We should be under no illusions,” said Sharma in a press briefing last week. “Producing a vaccine is a colossal undertaking, a complex process which will take many months, there are no guarantees.”
Writing in the Observer on 19 April, Vallance did say that with more than 80 vaccine projects across the world “there is cause for optimism” but that “all new vaccines that come into development are long shots…This will take time, and we should be clear it is not a certainty.”