Coronavirus: do mass vaccinations mean UK is ‘seven weeks from safety’?

Boris Johnson says Britain’s third national lockdown will be the ‘final phase of the struggle’ against the Covid-19 pandemic

Boris Johnson during a visit to view the vaccination programme at Chase Farm Hospital.
The PM has pinned his hopes on a rapid vaccine rollout
(Image credit: Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

People may have woken up this morning with a sense of deja vu after Boris Johnson announced another national lockdown last night in a bid to curb spiralling Covid infection rates.

But while the prime minister warned that the weeks ahead “will be the hardest yet”, he insisted that the third shutdown was “the last phase of the struggle”, thanks to the country’s mass vaccination programme.

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Joe Evans is the world news editor at TheWeek.co.uk. He joined the team in 2019 and held roles including deputy news editor and acting news editor before moving into his current position in early 2021. He is a regular panellist on The Week Unwrapped podcast, discussing politics and foreign affairs. 

Before joining The Week, he worked as a freelance journalist covering the UK and Ireland for German newspapers and magazines. A series of features on Brexit and the Irish border got him nominated for the Hostwriter Prize in 2019. Prior to settling down in London, he lived and worked in Cambodia, where he ran communications for a non-governmental organisation and worked as a journalist covering Southeast Asia. He has a master’s degree in journalism from City, University of London, and before that studied English Literature at the University of Manchester.