Government cannot give ‘100% certainty’ current lockdown will be last, minister admits

‘We do want it to be the last lockdown — that’s what we’re working towards,’ James Cleverly says

(PA)

The government cannot give “100 per cent certainty” that the current nationwide lockdown will be the last, a Foreign Office minister has admitted.

While insisting the roll-out of vaccines was having a “positive effect” — some 16.4 million have now received a first dose — James Cleverly said it was not possible to predict how the virus could evolve. 

His comments came as Boris Johnson prepares to publish the government’s roadmap to easing the third national lockdown in England on Monday, outlining how restrictions will be gradually eased.

The prime minister stressed earlier this week that he wanted the unlocking to be “irreversible”, but told a Downing Street Covid-19 press conference he could not offer an “absolute cast iron guarantee”.

Pressed on the issue on Sky News, Mr Cleverly said: “Well, we do want it to be the last lockdown — that’s what we’re working towards. We can see that the action we have taken have had a positive effect. The vaccine rollout has been very, very successful and will be having a positive effect. 

“But ultimately no-one can predict with complete certainty what the [virus] will do, how it might evolve. We are taking the right action… and we very much hope this will be the last lockdown.

“We can’t give complete 100 per cent certainty because viruses don’t work like that but we know we are doing the right things, we can see it’s having an effect and we are assessing just how that effectiveness is playing out in the real world.”

As the prime minister prepares to address the nation next week, government scientific adviser professor Neil Ferguson told BBC Radio 4’s Today he was “encouraged” by the cautious approach being taken to easing the lockdown.

“It still may well be that by the end of May, we’re in a very different country than we are today,” he said. 

Professor Ferguson, whose modelling helped persuade the government to impose a lockdown at the onset of the pandemic last year, added that dataon vaccine effectiveness and how quickly infection, deaths and hospital cases were declining was “looking promising at the moment”.

“The trade off we have is between how quickly can we relax and how quickly we can immunise and protect the population.

“And there’s still risks at the moment in relaxing too quickly when we don’t have enough immunity in the population bearing in mind that no vaccine is a panacea, no vaccine will offer perfect protection.”

He said it was still “early days” when it came to the data on vaccine effectiveness but suggested that a figure of two-thirds efficacy from a single dose of a vaccine was “not too far off”.

Mr Cleverly also declined to be drawn on speculation Britons would be permitted to take holidays overseas in the summer, saying: “At this stage we are not able to say what the situation will be for holidays this summer.”

He told BBC Breakfast: “I get how frustrating this is, it’s completely natural. We all want to get a break from this, I get that. But it would wrong for me to start speculating now.

“We are assessing the numbers, we are making a judgment based on the science and we will be making an announcement on Monday. I can’t go further than that.”