Matt Hancock held a televised coronavirus briefing, just hours after Prime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed some lockdown restrictions could be lifted in weeks.
The Health Secretary spoke to the nation from Downing Street to update the nation on the fight against COVID.
It comes as new positive coronavirus cases have fallen by 20 per cent in the past week, with an additional 30,004 people reported to have the virus.
With England’s third national lockdown beginning to pay off, Boris Johnson indicated some restrictions could be lifted in a matter of weeks.
He said that they were studying the data as it came in, and they were looking at the rates of infection and that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation predicts the most vulnerable will be vaccinated by February 15, but before then they’ll be looking at the potential easing of some measures.
And that the country has made tremendous progress in conquering the virus and that he didn’t believe people would want to see another huge wave of infection.
He went on to say the reopening of schools continued to be a priority, and he said that there was nothing more he wanted to do than to reopen schools because he’d worked so hard to keep schools open for a long as he possibly could.
He said that they wanted to see schools back as quick as possible and that they wanted to do it in a way that was consistent with combating the pandemic and keeping the infection rate down.
A No 10 source added that while a review of the current measures could take place before the middle of next month, the measures would remain in position until after February 15.
The Prime Minister is under mounting tension from his backbench MPs to outline his strategy to return the United Kingdom to normal now the vaccine is being successfully rolled out across the country.
With almost half a million people getting their first dose of a jab yesterday, meaning 6.3 million Brits now have some level of protection against coronavirus.
Former chief whip Mark Harper, chairman of the lockdown sceptic COVID Recovery Group has been demanding restrictions begin to be eased from the start of March.
He said once the most vulnerable had received a jab there was a need to help start bringing the economy back to life.
But have you seen the roads, they’re as rammed as they were pre COVID, and borders were supposed to be closed in England, yet people are still coming into the country.
And Boris Johnson keeps throwing the doormat under the bus and you can see the fear in his eyes, and if people acknowledged that instead of being British thinking they would know that there’s no need for half this madness.
Positive cases don’t matter because the test is flawed and the author of the test said so with a 99.8 per cent recovery rate from whatever this is, and there are scores of respiratory viruses, so why didn’t the Government want people to hide before?
I’m sure Boris Johnson makes it up as he goes along, like a bumbling nincompoop as he does so. Is this so he can just get our hopes up or is he playing games with us? And the oligarchs will continue this madness as long as they want to, but if you want the vaccine, have it, if you don’t then don’t, it’s that simple.
Perhaps they were playing games right from the start and now it’s coming back to bite them on the bottom because they’ve told us so many inaccuracies, they now can’t remember which ones they’ve told anymore.
