THE prospect of life returning to some kind of normality by late May has been raised by a UK Government expert while another insisted the vaccination programme was “doing the job” in cutting the Covid-19 infection rate.

With all the governments across the four nations tentatively planning a lifting of restrictions in the coming weeks, senior scientific adviser Professor Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London said reports that claimed data showed a single dose of the coronavirus vaccine cut infection and transmission rates by two-thirds were “not too far off”.

The epidemiologist said he was encouraged by the cautious approach being taken by ministers and that an incremental approach would be adopted.

“Relax one thing and see what the impact is; relax again. And it still may well be that by the end of May, we’re in a very different country than we are today,” Prof Ferguson suggested, noting how some rules would still be in place “but society will be a lot more normal”.

However, he warned that the downside of taking bigger risks was “you risk having to lock down again, which is even more disruptive economically and socially”.

Prof Ferguson added: “There are threats out there. We don’t know, for instance, quite how effective the vaccines are, how long immunity will last; there is the threat of variants. So, we have to be driven by the data and the trends we see.”

His colleague, Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol and a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, claimed that “everything’s moving in the right direction” when it came to the impact of vaccines on the pandemic.

He explained: “We’ve now got to the point with the study we’re doing in Bristol where we can say with certainty that there is definitely an effect.

“It’s just hard to put an exact number on it at this point because…the numbers of cases coming through are still building up, the number of people who’ve been vaccinated are still going up, but it’s becoming clearer for the Pfizer vaccine, which we’ve been using for a month longer, since early December, and it’ll take slightly longer for us to get a firm handle on just how well the AstraZeneca vaccine is preventing hospitalisations too, but they’re definitely doing the job.”

His comments came as a study of 7,000 Israeli healthcare workers showed that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was 85% effective in preventing people developing Covid-19 symptoms after the first dose.

The findings, published in the journal Lancet, appear to provide reassurance about the UK’s decision to delay the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine – given the high level of protection from the first shot – in order to increase the number of people getting the jab.

The scientists also found that all infections, including those without symptoms, were reduced by 75% after the first dose.

Commenting on the research, Deborah Dunn-Walters, Chairwoman of the British Society for Immunology Covid-19 and Immunology Taskforce and Professor of Immunology at the University of Surrey, said: “Due to the high percentage of the Israeli population vaccinated so far, we have been awaiting data from there to indicate the first signs of how effective Covid-19 vaccines are outside of a clinical trial setting and how dosing schedule plays into this.”

She added: “It should be noted that this study was carried out on people of working age, so it will be informative to see a similar study in older people after one dose.

“Although further research is needed, overall, these new findings should provide reassurance around the UK’s decision to offer the two doses of the vaccine 12 weeks apart.”

Meanwhile, a third expert, Dr Mike Tildesley, who advises the Government as a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, also urged ministers to lift the lockdown slowly.

He told BBC Breakfast: “We do know any form of reopening will cause the R number to go up so that needs very, very careful monitoring.

“The vaccination campaign is going very, very well…but where we need to be careful is if we open too quickly and don’t allow the vaccination programme to help us along the way, we run the issue of things resurging a little bit.

“I totally appreciate and understand the need to get children back in the classroom…The key thing for me is we need to do it in a way that schools don’t have to close again,” he added.

Public Health England is due to publish data shortly which shows the effectiveness of the current vaccination programme.

Prof Ferguson, who pointed out that he had not yet booked a holiday, said people would be isolating “forevermore” if the desire was to eliminate Covid-19 completely.

“We’re not going to eliminate globally so we won’t eliminate here. I would like to see this virus become like influenza and managed in similar ways.

“And the one thing this pandemic has generated is a whole new generation of vaccines, which, frankly, are much more effective than the influenza vaccines we typically use year to year. So, long-term we do have very promising prospects for pulling down the burden of disease, the mortality caused by this virus, quite dramatically.”

In other developments -

*Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly said it would be wrong for him to speculate on whether summer holidays could go ahead. He said ministers were “making a judgement based on the science” ahead of an announcement on Monday from Boris Johnson on the route out of lockdown in England.

*Data from the Zoe app study from King’s College London suggests a 5% drop in symptomatic cases of Covid in the UK on average in the most recent week. It puts the current reproduction number, the R rate, for the UK at 0.9.

*Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has received his first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine with his asthma putting him in a priority group. The Labour politician visited a vaccine centre at the Mitcham Lane Baptist Church in south-west London.

*Wales’ First Minister Mark Drakeford said some aspects of non-essential retail, as well as personal services such as hairdressing, could begin to reopen there from March 15, with stay-at-home restrictions eased in three weeks.