Summer holidays and ‘normal life’ on horizon as health chiefs hail ‘historic’ Covid vaccine rollout

People will be in a “better place” to get on planes next summer
Brits could be in a ‘better place’ to get on planes by the summer
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The UK’s coronavirus vaccine tsar has said she expects families will be able to go on holiday next summer as the Covid jab started its historic rollout.  

Kate Bingham, chair of the coronavirus vaccine taskforce, said she expects by the summer that people will be in a “better place” to get on planes.  

She made the comments just hours after Margaret Keenan, 90, became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer jab on what has been dubbed “V-Day”.

Ms Bingham told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "My gut feel is that we will all be going on summer holidays. 

"It is likely that those people most at risk will be vaccinated through to April, and then the JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] and the Department for Health will then consider how to broaden out the vaccinations to other adults.

"I think by the summer we should be in a much better place to get on planes.”

However she warned that she did not think we would get away from the virus “ever”, adding: “We're going to have to maintain sensible hygiene and washing hands, and so on.

"I would like this vaccine to be as routine as an annual flu jab and that we manage it rather than get bowed down by it.”

Kate Bingham 
Getty Images

It comes after the aviation industry was hit hard by the pandemic and measures such as the 14-day quarantine rules.  

Meanwhile Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, said 2020 had been a “dreadful” year but life would get back to “normal” in the coming months.

He told BBC Breakfast: “It’s been a really dreadful year 2020, hasn’t it? All those things that we are so used to, meeting friends and families, going to the cinema, all being disrupted.

“We can get those back, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but in the months to come as this vaccine programme rolls out, we will start to get back to normal.”

Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told Sky News there will need to be some form of measures in place until spring.

He said: “The rules are what’s keeping the virus down now. We need to keep the virus down whilst we allow the vaccine programme to roll out.

“I would anticipate that if the vaccines arrive and if the AstraZeneca vaccine gets approved that you start to see enough people having been vaccinated in spring some time to start thinking yes this is returning towards normal.  

“But when it becomes completely normal and completely normal across the whole world is going to take longer.”

He suggested we may need masks still in place next winter and social distancing or covid measures would “certainly” continue until spring.

He added: “I would expect sort of spring time – April something like that – you start to see more return towards normality.  

“Thereafter it’s going to take a while before you get full normality.”

He said the tier restrictions needed to continue to keep the virus down and when the vulnerable are all protected they could consider doing some things differently.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that when enough vulnerable people have been vaccinated "then, of course, we can lift the restrictions ... we think that will be in the spring.”

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