UK needs 'early warning system' for new Covid variants says vaccine expert

The UK needs an 'early warning system' to track new variants when Covid restrictions are lifted, a leading vaccine expert has said. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to announce his living with Covid plan today (Monday, February 21) which will see the scrapping of regulations put in place to control the pandemic. Professor Sir Andrew Pollard told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there is a need to monitor variants to see if they are more dangerous than Omicron. The director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford said: “One of the key things is, whenever we do reduce restrictions, we need to have a number of measures in place for that period, and one of the most critical is surveillance for the virus, an early warning system if you like, which tells us about new variants emerging and gives an ability to monitor whether those new variants are indeed causing more severe disease than Omicron did.