UK Health Sec.: Gap between Vaccine Shots 'Essential'

UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock warned, on Sunday, that there is still a “long, long, way” until England’s current tough lockdown is eased.

Hancock stated that “early evidence” indicated that Covid-19 cases were dropping thanks to the tough restrictions, adding “we don’t know the answer” to how long the lockdown will last.

“We know there is a risk the new variant is more deadly – unfortunately that is the result of the scientific analysis since it has been discovered,” Hancock asserted, noting that the National Health Service (NHS) remains under "enormous" pressure.

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"We should be worried enough, all of us, about this pandemic to follow the rules and it is just so important that people do,” he told Sophy Ridge. "This morning I've come out of my formal self-isolation, I haven't actually left the house yet because I haven't needed to."

"As of this morning, three-quarters of all over-80s in the UK have been vaccinated," he wrote on Twitter. "We’ve vaccinated more people in just the last three days than France has in the history of this disease."

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He stressed that the 12-week maximum gap in between doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is "essential" in order to save as many lives as possible.

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The health secretary said that 77 cases of the South African variant of coronavirus had been found in the UK, all of them connected to travel from South Africa and under close observation.

“There are 77 known cases of the South African variant here in the UK,” he said on BBC television.

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“They are under very close observation, and we have enhanced contact tracing to do everything we possibly can to stop them from spreading,” the health secretary said, adding that all the known cases were people who had travelled from South Africa or had contact with someone else who had done so.