International travel will not get back to normal ‘for foreseeable future’, warns leading scientist

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Virologist Prof Lawrence Young said the threat of mutant strains meant “caution” will be needed at Britain’s borders
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International travel will not get back to normal “for the foreseeable future” because of the risk of mutant strains of Covid-19 emerging in other countries, a leading scientist said.

Virologist Prof Lawrence Young said the threat of mutant strains meant “caution” will be needed at Britain’s borders and by Britons travelling abroad to areas with lower vaccination. “I think there has to be a level of caution over that for the foreseeable future,” he told Today.

His comments come days after Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said holiday flights could start again from May 17, but cautioned people not to book just yet in case new variants or higher infections caused a delay.

Prof Young said mass vaccination would suppress the generation of new variants, but it would take a long time before people stop needing annual booster jabs to cope with them.

“I think the big worry with these variants is the fact that they're still being generated,” said the professor of molecular oncology at Warwick University. “There's increasing evidence now about reinfection, particularly in Brazil.”

In other developments:

* Health services in Italy and France reported increasing strain from the spread of the Kent variant that originated in the UK, which experts now believe is twice as deadly as first thought.

* Cancer patients were alerted that a single dose of Pfizer vaccine does not offer adequate protection. The danger to patients whose immune systems have been damaged was shown in a study from King's College London and the Francis Crick Institute, which has not yet been peer reviewed.

* A surge in vaccine supply is due in the next week or two, health officials said, which should allow the UK to speed up its rollout.

The new study of cancer patients put a question mark over the safety of a 12 week gap between jabs. It found that three weeks after the first Pfizer jab, antibody responses were found in 39 per cent of people with solid cancers and 13 per cent of people with blood cancer. This compared with 97 per cent of people with no cancer.

Cancer patients given a second dose of the vaccine three weeks after the first - as recommended by Pfizer - had a much better immune response, with 95 per cent of those with solid tumours showing detectable antibodies.

However, Cancer Research UK said the study was relatively small and people should continue to follow the advice of their doctors.

Dr Sheeba Irshad, senior clinical lecturer from King's College London, said: "Our data provides the first real-world evidence of immune efficacy following one dose of the Pfizer vaccine in immunocompromised patient populations.

"We show that following first dose, most solid and haematological (blood) cancer patients remained immunologically unprotected up until at least five weeks following primary injection; but this poor one-dose efficacy can be rescued with an early booster (second dose) at day 21.

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