Scotland’s deputy first minister John Swinney says he cannot rule out tougher restrictions, and the use of higher-grade face coverings, for example, is being “actively explored”.
Swinney told Sunday Politics Scotland there had been a reduction of about a third in the level of cases in the past fortnight, which was “very encouraging given the very alarming acceleration in cases which took place just after Christmas.
We are making progress under the measures we have in place. We will continue to look at what else might be possible to continue that progress.
Asked about return to schools, he said he hoped to give two weeks’ notice to parents about return to face-to-face learning, and the Scottish government was exploring the earlier return of particular groups including early learning and childcare, younger primary pupils, older pupils doing national qualifications and those with additional support needs.
A GP has described the extended time between doses of coronavirus vaccinations in the UK as an “unregulated and unlicensed trial”.
Dr Rosie Shire, a member of the Doctors’ Association UK, told Sky News that studies of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine showed two doses three weeks apart gave 90% immunity.
What really concerns us is we don’t know what happens if you don’t give that second dose of vaccination after three weeks. The fact is that people are being vaccinated now and being put into what is effectively an unregulated unlicensed trial, whereby they’re receiving this vaccination on the understanding that they don’t know what’s going on.”
She added that while three-quarters of all people over 80 in the UK had been given the first dose of a vaccine, this did not mean they were fully vaccinated.
Doctors “don’t know” if people are going to be fully vaccinated once they receive the second dose after the 12-week period between doses, Shire said.
The EU will make pharmaceutical companies respect contracts they have signed for the supply of Covid vaccines, the European council president, Charles Michel, has said, amid growing frustration over significant delays to agreed schedules.
Pfizer said last week it was temporarily slowing supplies to Europe to make manufacturing changes that would boost output. On Friday, AstraZeneca also said initial deliveries to the region would fall short because of a production glitch.
“We plan to make the pharmaceutical companies respect the contracts they have signed … by using the legal means at our disposal,” Michel said on Europe 1 radio.
He did not mention possible sanctions but said the EU would insist on transparency about the reasons for the delays. He said that after Pfizer’s first warnings about delays of several weeks, the EU had managed to reduce these delays by taking a tough stance.
“We banged our fist on the table and finally announced delays of several weeks turned into a slowdown of deliveries,” he said.
The European council president, Charles Michel, speaks at the European Council headquarters in Brussels on Thursday. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/AP
More than £15,000 in fines were issued after 300 people were caught at a rave in east London, UK, in breach of Covid regulations, police have said.
Having received intelligence that an unlicensed music event might be taking place in Hackney on the night of 23 January, officers were deployed to the area. Shortly after 01:30hrs, they found an event underway in a railway arch in Nursery Road, E9. There was loud music coming from inside and it was that a significant number of people were present.
Additional resources were deployed, including public order officers, a dog unit and the police helicopter. Numerous attempts were made to engage with organisers and others but they were uncooperative. At one point the doors were padlocked from the inside to stop police getting in. When officers forced entry, they found an estimated 300 people packed inside the small space. Dozens scaled fences at the rear of the arch and others forced open a gate to get away from officers. 78 people were stopped and issued with fixed penalty notices to the value of £200 for breaching Covid regulations by attending an illegal gathering.
Ch Supt Roy Smith, who attended the incident, said:
This was a serious and blatant breach of the public health regulations and the law in relation to unlicensed music events. Officers were forced, yet again, to put their own health at risk to deal with a large group of incredibly selfish people who were tightly packed together in a confined space - providing an ideal opportunity for this deadly virus to spread.
The Met Police have broken up yet another massive party in London. More than £15,000 in fines were handed out after 300 people were caught at an illegal rave in a railway arch in Hackney. pic.twitter.com/Tp4ZYDTIi4
Asked why Scotland’s vaccine rollout was initially slower than elsewhere in the UK, Nicola Sturgeon said that the Scottish government had taken a deliberate decision, in line with JCVI advice, to focus initially on care home residents. She pointed out that Matt Hancock told Marr that three-quarters of those in England had been vaccinated – in Scotland that figure is now 95%.
“It takes longer, it’s more resource intensive to do care homes, but it’s the right decision,” she said. She added that 40% of over 80s in Scotland had now been vaccinated and that the Scottish government was “well on track to complete all over 80s by the beginning of February.” She said that over 70s will start getting their appointments from tomorrow.
She said that 400,000 doses had now been administered in Scotland, while the remaining doses in Scotland’s 700,000 allocation were being distributed to health boards and GPs.
UK examining data suggesting first shot immunity as low as 33%
The deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has said it is examining data from Israel indicating that immunity after a first dose of Covid-19 vaccine could be as low as 33%.
Prof Anthony Harnden told Sky’s Sophie Ridge On Sunday:
The Israeli data is preliminary data, it does involve PCR testing which is of course asymptomatic cases as well as symptomatic cases. They have not followed up for more than three weeks and the statistical methods they used are not clear. We will be looking at this in detail but at the moment our clear steer is the delayed second dose strategy is going to save many lives nationally.
He added that people could end up needing an annual coronavirus shot to keep up with variations in the virus.
We may well be in a situation where we have to have an annual coronavirus vaccine much like we do with the flu vaccine, but the public should be reassured that these technologies are relatively easy to edit and tweak, so once we find strains that are predominant, the vaccines can be altered.
At the moment it is really good news that these vaccines we are delivering at the moment do seem to be effective against the major circulating strains and the variant strains in the UK at the moment.
'Palestinians have to take care of their own health', says Israeli health minister
Asked why Israel is not vaccinating Palestinians in the country and under occupation in the West Bank – despite the United Nations saying it is their legal obligation to ensure they have access, and pressure from senior rabbis to act – Edelstein says it is prioritising its own citizens.
As far as the vaccination is concerned, it’s the Israel obligation first and foremost to its citizens. They pay taxes for that don’t they, but having said that I do remember that it is our interest – not our legal obligation – to make sure Palestinians get the vaccine. That they won’t have Covid-19 spreading.
First of all, we could also look to the Oslo agreements where it says loud and clear that Palestinians have to take care of their own health. If it’s the responsibility of the Israeli health minister to take care of the Palestinians, what exactly is the responsibility of the Palestinian health minister - to take care of the dolphins in the Mediterranean?
When the Palestinians turned to us, I authorised passing some vaccines to those medical teams who directly work with corona patients in the Palestinian authority and as you can here in this interview, its not because I think that we have a legal obligation, its because they’re doctors and nurses and they [hadn’t got] the vaccine at this stage.
First dose of Pfizer shot does not immediately prevent Covid infection, confirms Israeli health minister
After Israel’s health ministry this week rowed back on comments by the country’s coronavirus tsar, who suggested single doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine had not given as much protection against the disease as had been hoped, the country’s health minister has said there have been cases among those inoculated.
Yuli Edelstein told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show:
We’re just in the beginning of the campaign, we unfortunately do see cases that after getting the first dose, people do get sick, get the coronavirus. At the same time there are some encouraging signs of less severe diseases, less people hospitalised after the first dose. At this stage its very difficult to say, its not a clinical trial yet ... We sincerely hope we will have better information soon.
We still have a very small number of those who we consider fully vaccinated, meaning a week after the second dose, according to Pfizer’s instructions ... We decided to follow their instructions.
We have nearly 28% of the population is under the age 16. Of the rest of the population, we want to get to very high numbers, probably to 80%, and then we’ll be able to talk about something that reminds herd immunity. We do have to keep in mind that those who recovered from Covid are not being vaccinated, we consider them at this stage immune.
Vaccination is not a panacea ... Corona is still with us and we’ll have to live with this reality for a long time.
Germany to use Covid antibody cocktails touted by Trump in EU first
Germany will become the first EU country to start using the same experimental antibodies treatment credited with helping Donald Trump recover from Covid-19, health minister Jens Spahn has said, AFP reports.
“The government has bought 200,000 doses for 400 million euros ($486 million),” Spahn told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, working out at 2,000 euros per dose. The so-called monoclonal antibody cocktails will be deployed to university hospitals in the coming week, he said, adding that Germany was “the first country in the EU” to use them in the fight against the pandemic.
Spahn did not name the manufacturer that will be supplying the drugs but confirmed it was the same medicine given to then-US president Trump when he fell ill with Covid last October. “They work like a passive vaccination. Administering these antibodies in the early stages can help high-risk patients avoid a more serious progression,” Spahn said.
Trump, who was briefly hospitalised with the coronavirus, was given the antibody therapy developed by US firm Regeneron, known as REGN-COV2, even before the treatment had won regulatory approval. He later said the medicine did “a fantastic job”. US company Eli Lilly has developed a similar therapy.
The novel treatment is a combination or “cocktail” of two lab-made antibodies: infection-fighting proteins that were developed to bind to the part of the new coronavirus that it uses to invade human cells. The antibodies attach themselves to different parts of the virus’s spike protein, distorting its structure - similar in a way to knocking a key out of shape so it no longer fits its lock.
Speaking on BBC’s Andrew Marr programme, the UK shadow foreign secretary has said – in response to a question about whether the country should close its borders to countries without high vaccine coverage in the future – that the government needed to take tougher measures.
There is no question we need to take border security much more seriously ... We would fully expect the government to bring in tougher quarantine measures, a proper testing strategy and check up on the people quarantining. Only three in 100 people who come into the UK have any checks on quarantining.
