Johnson is learning to curb his vaccine enthusiasm

Boris Johnson had a few positive things to offer this evening’s coronavirus briefing. Speaking alongside chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, the Prime Minister announced that 3.3 million people had received their vaccines, including nearly 45 per cent of the over-80s. Whitty, meanwhile, had the sort-of good news that the government thinks the peak of infections has now passed in London, the South East and East of England. The considerably less cheery flip side of that, of course, is that we have yet to reach the peak of hospitalisations and deaths in these regions, let alone the rest of the country.

Johnson is clearly trying very hard to contain his optimism: he spoke mainly about the vaccine in relation to his announcement that the government was closing all travel corridors from the early hours of Monday. He said: ‘It’s precisely because we have the hope of the vaccine and the risk of new strains coming from overseas that we must take additional steps now to stop those strains from entering the country.’

He also refrained from setting a timetable for an exit from the restrictions — despite some Tory MPs starting to agitate more noisily for one. Instead, the Prime Minister and the scientists were clear that there would not be an abrupt exit from the restrictions. Vallance warned that the vaccine was unlikely to suppress transmission of the virus, so people shouldn’t go mad once everyone had been vaccinated. This underlined, once again, that even if we do have the ‘great’ summer that Matt Hancock recently predicted in The Spectator, it won’t be free of the impact of Covid by any means.