Blair’s four-point Covid plan: Ex-PM calls for experimental drugs to be deployed more widely, speeded up vaccines and faster testing
- Tony Blair today published a four-point plan to tackle the UK’s coronavirus crisis
- He said experimental drugs should be offered to all seriously ill Covid patients
- Also called for swift roll out of rapid tests and vaccinations to start in December
Tony Blair today published a four-point plan to avoid future lockdowns as he urged the Government to offer experimental treatments to all seriously ill coronavirus patients.
The former Labour prime minister said the UK is at an ‘absolutely critical juncture’ in its response to the Covid-19 crisis.
He urged the Government to use the forthcoming England-wide lockdown to put in place measures which could prevent a repeat shutdown next year.
As well as offering trial drugs to more patients, Mr Blair argued for the swift roll out of rapid tests, vaccinations to start from next month and improved data collection so ministers can better understand outbreaks.
Tony Blair today published a four-point plan for the UK Government to avoid future lockdowns
Mr Blair’s Institute for Global Change today published a report called ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’ which sets out a series of recommendations for the Government to consider.
Mr Blair said in the foreword that the ongoing second wave of infections ‘could be as large or even larger than the first’.
He said the Government’s aim for the four-week national lockdown, due to start on Thursday, should be to ‘use November to re-emerge in December with this lockdown being the last’.
The former premier said the first wave ‘had an economic cost roughly three times that of the financial crisis’ in 2008 and ‘the consequence of a further round of lockdowns will be devastating’.
Mr Blair said he is ‘optimistic’ that vaccines and improved therapeutic drugs will be available by the second quarter of next year when things will be able to ‘return to something like normal’.
Until that point he said the ‘only game-changers’ are vaccines, therapeutics and large-scale testing.
On trial drugs, Mr Blair said they should be offered to ‘any hospitalised patients at risk of serious illness’ if they have been shown to be ‘safe and meet a minimum level of efficacy’.
On vaccines, he said the Government should ‘shorten every element’ of the development process ‘insofar as is humanly possible’ with the aim to get the first vaccinations underway in December.
Mr Blair has long called for the roll out of a mass rapid testing programme to eliminate the need for people to quarantine for long periods.
He said rapid testing would help to catch asymptomatic cases and stop the spread of infection as he called for checks in schools, universities and workplaces to be built into the system.
The former Labour chief also warned ministers they ‘must not repeat the error of the tracing app when it comes to data’.
He said the Government needs to put in place an effective system to track patient numbers, test numbers and vaccination numbers so that ‘every part of the experience is recorded’.