Boris Johnson has described the roadmap he has published for the lifting of lockdown measures in England as “a one-way road to freedom”. He made the comment at a No 10 press conference, after he spent more than two hours in the Commons setting out his plans to MPs. In the chamber Johnson rejected a call from lockdown-sceptic Tory MPs for all restrictions to be lifted at the end of April, once all adults have had their first dose of vaccine (see 4.47pm), and in his press conference he insisted that he was being cautious. In response to a question from the political editor of the Daily Mail, who suggested he had become a risk-averse “gloomster”, Johnson said: The crocus of hope is poking through the frost and spring is on its way both literally and metaphorically. But I won’t be buccaneering, as you put it, with people’s lives, and nor will anybody in government. I think when people look at this road map I think actually it’s about as dynamic as it’s possible to be under the circumstances and with disease and infection where we are. If you’d said to me a few months ago that by June 21 we were going to be in a position where we thought it was really credible to open up everything including nightclubs, I would have struggled to believe you, quite frankly. But that’s the miracle of the vaccination programme that has delivered that. Johnson claimed that his lockdown plan would be driven by data, not dates, and that the plan for restrictions to be lifted in four stages, tied to four specific dates, with a five-week gap between them, was provisional. But, as Newsnight’s Lewis Goodall points out, the tests being used by the government to determine when further easing can take place (see 12.49pm), are vague.
Here is the 60-page document (pdf) setting out the plan. And here is a summary by my colleague Peter Walker.
Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, has hinted that he would back vaccines being made compulsory for health workers. Speaking at the press conference, he stressed that this was a political matter that was not up to him. But he said: It is a professional responsibility for doctors to do things which will protect their patients. And I expect that to be a professional responsibility for all other health and social care staff as well. He also said there were precedents for rules of this kind. For example, surgeons were expected to have the hepatitis B vaccine, he said. Johnson has said “there may well be a role” for domestic “Covid passports”. For weeks the government has been saying it does not favour using vaccination certificates to control people’s access to jobs or venues or services in the UK. But Johnson has now ordered a review into this. Explaining the change of approach at the press conference, he said: There are clearly some quite complex issues, some ethical issues, issues about discrimination and so on, to what extent can governments either compel or indeed forbid use of such certification. I think all that needs to be gone into so we are going to have a review of the whole issue before we come to it ... There may well be a role for certification but we just need to get it right. Some of the youngest pupils are back in classrooms in Wales and Scotland, but ministers in the two nations have insisted that they will phase the return for other year groups rather than follow the English model of reopening schools to all pupils at the same time. Real-world evidence from the Covid vaccination programmes in England and Scotland show that one dose of vaccine gives high protection against severe disease and admission to hospital – and protects against even mild disease with no symptoms in younger people. Plans for all children in England to be back at school on March 8 are “madness” and risk prolonging the “damaging cycle of stop-start schooling”, head teachers and unions have warned.