“I hope we will be one of the first major economies to demonstrate to the world how you transition from pandemic to endemic,” Nadhim Zahawi, a UK government minister, stated last week. “We are moving to a situation where it is possible to say that we can live with COVID and that the pressure on the NHS and on vital public services is abating,” echoed Michael Gove, another senior minister.
When it comes to COVID-19, the message resonating from the UK government is loud and clear: the virus is here to stay, and the time has come to learn to ‘live with it’. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, is expected to announce details of such a plan within the coming weeks.
That COVID-19 is not going to disappear anytime soon is undoubtedly true. As long as large parts of the world remain unvaccinated – a problem created in large part by the refusal of countries such as the UK to support waiving patents on COVID vaccines – it is likely that new variants of the virus will continue to emerge in the months and years ahead. Vaccines, which to date have been designed to fight the original strain of the virus that emerged in Wuhan in 2019, may struggle to keep up. As an editorial in The Lancet medical journal recently noted:
