'No guarantees' that school closures won't happen again due to Covid, Sajid Javid says

Mr Javid told LBC Radio while he did not want to see it happen, "when it comes to our fight against this pandemic, there are no guarantees".

There are currently 10 people in England in hospital with confirmed cases of the new Omicron variant of Covid and on Sunday night, Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned the country was facing a "tidal wave" of further cases as he announced plans to speed up the rollout of booster jabs.

Speaking on Monday morning, Mr Javid said he could not guarantee schools would not close again due to the pandemic.

Asked on LBC whether this remained a possibility, Mr Javid said: “Well, I don’t want to see that or any of these kinds of measures. I’m just going to focus on everything else we need to be doing, especially the booster programme.”

He added: “I’d say this… if you are asking me for guarantees, I will just say – as the Health Secretary, of course, I’m not the Education Secretary – as the Health Secretary, that there are, when it comes to our fight against this pandemic, there are no guarantees.

“But what we do know that works is, in this case, a booster shot of the vaccine.”

Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said we should be looking at Covid as an “acute respiratory pathogen that actually mutates, like all viruses of this nature do, and, after about a year, those people in the most vulnerable group will require a booster, particularly to protect them from hospitalisation and death.

“And I think what we’ll be looking at is an annual campaign, particularly targeting those most at risk, irrespective of what happens with variants.”

Asked on Times Radio whether people may suffer “vaccine-fatigue”, he said coronaviruses mutate at a very high rate.

“What will be happening is for those most of risk, we will probably get into this annual cycle.

“But, actually, for younger people, the message is not as clear because what happens with younger people is a high proportion of those have already had the infection, and I think we should be recognising that.

“In some areas, it’s as many as 90 per cent have got antibodies to protect themselves… So what we need to do is be a bit smarter about what we’re seeing right now and work out some of these issues – who’s got natural immunity, which people need the boosters, and particularly those over 75.”

He added that “we’re setting up a strategy very much like influenza (annual vaccines)”.

“What we can’t do each year is stop healthcare, switch it off and replace it with a vaccine system that says ‘for the next month, we’re switching off healthcare’.

Asked on Times Radio about cases overwhelming the NHS, Prof Heneghan said the health service needs about 20 per cent extra capacity that is flexible, adding that those beds could be in the community for the elderly and vulnerable.

He added: “What happens is we get to this point in time, the NHS keeps saying it’s overwhelmed, we’ll be in the same position next year, we only have about 100,000 beds for 57 million people in England, it is insufficient at this time of year.

“So we have to bring in rules and regulations because we’re not properly preparing.

“And until we do that, until we realise we need to be flexible, we’ll end up in this bind. And if we’re not careful, we’ll be back talking about this next year, when we’re talking about the NHS being overwhelmed again.”

Read more:

All adults in England to be offered Covid booster jab by New Year

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