Dominic Raab: Vaccine ‘not likely’ this year
The Foreign Secretary was in charge of the government’s media round this morning. Yesterday, hospital figures showed the UK’s official death toll for those displaying symptoms of Covid-19 had now passed 20,000. Acknowledging this ‘grim milestone’, Dominic Raab told Sophy Ridge that the government was ‘driving forward’ in its efforts to combat the virus, but said that previous hopes for a vaccine being ready as early as the autumn were misplaced:
DR: We’re looking at the possibility of a vaccine. That’s not likely to come to fruition this year, but it could be important if we get multiple waves of coronavirus globally down the track.
UK testing capacity now at 51,000 a day
The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has set a target of 100,000 tests for Covid-19 being carried out by the end of the month. With days left to achieve this important benchmark figure, Raab asserted that the government was still ‘on track’, citing ‘exponential’ growth in capacity due to take place over the following week:
DR: Our capacity for carrying out tests is now at 51,000 per day, so we’ve passed the halfway line… You always get [an] exponential increase in a project like this in the last week as the capacity comes on tap.
Boris Johnson is ‘raring to go’
Today is Raab’s final day deputising for the Prime Minister, who is set to resume his duties in full on Monday after his spell on an intensive care ward in St Thomas’ Hospital. Raab told Ridge that Johnson is now firmly on the mend:
DR: He’s in good spirits. He’s taken the time, and taken the doctors’ advice, to rebuild his strength. He’s going to be back at work full time, properly at the helm on Monday, and as you can imagine… he’s raring to go.
Reports of Kim Jong-un death ‘uncorroborated’
Ridge asked Raab about reports about the health of another world leader, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Various outlets have speculated as to whether Kim is either dead or otherwise incapacitated with little chance of recovery. Raab said that any such claims were still premature:
SR: Do you know if [Kim] is dead?
DR: The reports are uncorroborated. I’ve seen the international media reports, but we don’t have any verified state of play on that yet. Obviously, we’re following it very carefully.
Rosena Allin-Khan: Government should record care home deaths
Labour’s Shadow Minister for Mental Health, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, called on the government to include all reported Covid-19 deaths in the official figures, and not just the mortality figures released from hospitals:
RAK: The government also need to be recording the number of deaths in care homes and in the community as well as hospital deaths, because we won’t know… whether lockdown measures have been working… until we are recording all of the deaths.
Dominic Raab: UK will be moving ‘to a new normal’
Raab appeared again with Andrew Marr, who asked him about the steps that the government may take to lift the lockdown in the near future. Raab continued with the government line that it was too early to think about easing current restrictions, but said that life was unlikely to continue as we knew it for some time:
AM: Life is not going to return to normal is it, anytime soon?
DR: I think… we’ll end up moving to a new normal, and I think we will need to make sure that we can proceed in a sure-footed way… I know the temptation to start announcing proposals now, but actually until you’ve got the evidence that is not responsible.
NHS PPE ‘is the best we can get them’
Marr challenged Raab over the government’s performance on procuring personal protective equipment for NHS and social care staff, which has attracted particular criticism over the past few weeks after almost 100 staff working on the front lines have died:
AM: Have they had the best kit?
DR: The very best we can get them.
AM: That’s a ‘no’, isn’t it?
DR: …We’ve delivered a billion items of PPE to care homes, to the NHS [and] elsewhere where it’s needed. We’ve ramped up the domestic supply and procurement… and on the international side of things, we are making sure that we are the international buyer of choice.
Isabella Lövin: Beating coronavirus is a marathon, not a sprint
And finally, Andrew Marr spoke to Sweden’s deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin about her country’s radically different approach to tackling Covid-19. Sweden has not implemented a lockdown and has encouraged businesses and social venues to remain open throughout the coronavirus outbreak:
IL: We set out from the start realising that this is not going to be a sprint, this is going to be a marathon… If you have too harsh measures, then they can’t be sustained over time and you can get a counter-reaction… We don’t want to fatigue the population.
Comments