Coronavirus UK live: Matt Hancock under fire over PPE comments – live updates
Health secretary accused of suggesting healthcare workers are abusing or overusing protective equipment
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News that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready by September should be treated with “cautious optimism”, a medical expert has said.
Professor Stephen Evans, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warned on Saturday that there are “a number of hurdles to before you get to the point where the population is protected”.
Cautious optimism is entirely justified in these difficult times but if you think that that’s it, then you could be sorely disappointed.
There are numbers of hurdles to overcome before you get to the point where the population is protected.
I think getting all of that in place before the end of the year would be amazing, so it’s not just having the vaccine, it’s actually being able to deliver them.
What I would be doing and be prepared to invest in would be the system to deliver extremely large numbers of vaccine doses to the population as a whole. Such investment would pay off, whether it was the Oxford vaccine or some other that proved to be effective and have minimal harms.
After revealing 19 UK health workers have died after contracting coronavirus and amid backlash over his request that NHS staff do not overuse personal protective equipment, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said he was unaware of any link between the deaths and a lack of PPE but an investigation would be carried out into the extent to which health workers had caught the virus on the frontline. Here is the video:
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