Britain will be free of COVID-19 by mid August says, country's vaccine task force chief

The UK will have defeated the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 will no longer be circulating in Britain by August, UK’s departing Vaccines Taskforce (VTF) chairman Clive Dix told the Daily Telegraph on Friday.

The head of the government’s vaccines task force worked very "decisively" and at a "great pace" to improve UK's pandemic preparedness, the Boris Johnson administration’s report on the Taskforce’s vaccine strategy, goals and achievements had highlighted.

As the two-third, an estimated 35 million elderly (66.6%) of the UK’s total 67 million population was vaccinated with at least one dose of a COVID-19 jab, and more than 51.8 million shots were administered to the citizens between 8 December 2020 to 7 May 2021, UK is now on its way to being free of COVID-19 by 2nd quarter of 2021.

UK has now become the only second to Israel where more than half of the population, an estimated 3.5 million Israelis have been fully or partially vaccinated with a significant 53 percent decline in new cases of the coronavirus that spread from China in December 2019.

“Sometime in August, we will have no circulating virus in the UK,” Dix told the UK broadcaster Daily Telegraph, adding that he strongly believed with respect to data and analysis that the vaccine booster program might be pushed to early 2022. UK’s government had met its initial target of vaccinating the most vulnerable by 15 April of this year and will have given the first dose to “all adults” of the country by the end of July, a report by the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care released May 7, stated.

UK's Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said: “Two-thirds of the adult population have now been vaccinated with one dose in the UK - an incredible achievement.

Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) meanwhile also stressed that the UK will have its entire population protected from “all the coronavirus variants that are known” after everybody in the UK would have been vaccinated “at least once” by the end of July.

UK’s latest vaccine effectiveness data from PHE claimed that all adults aged over 70, who were jabbed with either the Pfizer/BioNTech or the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines have now been able to reduce the risk of getting symptomatic COVID-19 infection by around 60 percent.

With a robust vaccination plan, the UK has been able to achieve protection against COVID-19 respiratory disease and its hospitalization among those aged over 80 by about 80 percent, data from the ONS and Oxford University showed.

UK has been under strict lockdown due to the surge in COVID-19 cases.