A scientist who advised Downing Street on the response to coronavirus has slammed Sajid Javid and plans to lift lockdown measures. 

Professor Stephen Reicher dubbed the new health secretary’s approach ‘frightening’ and warned a new emphasis on ‘personal choice’ could be disastrous. 

Prime minister Boris Johnson is set to announce the scrapping of the majority of the rules that have come to define life in the UK over the previous 15 months. 

A televised briefing at 5pm today is expected to confirm plans to end mandatory mask-wearing in public and get rid of social distancing requirements in pubs and restaurants from July 19.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Javid accepted ‘cases are going to rise significantly’ but concluded: ‘We are going to have to learn to accept the existence of Covid and find ways to cope with it – just as we already do with flu.’

But with cases up by two thirds this week and millions still without double-jab protection, there is a growing chorus of experts warning this month may be too soon for ‘Freedom Day’.

Professor Stephen Reicher – who has advised the government on behavioural psychology and sits on the Independent Sage group – is among the most significant to publicly question the strategy.

The University of St Andrews academic posted on Twitter: ‘It is frightening to have a “health” secretary who still thinks Covid is flu, who is unconcerned at levels of infection, who doesn’t realise that those who do best for health also do best for the economy, who wants to ditch all protections while only half of us are vaccinated.

‘Above all, it is frightening to have a “health” secretary who wants to make all protections a matter of personal choice when the key message of the pandemic is “this isn’t an ‘I’ thing, it’s a ‘we’ thing”. 

‘Your behaviour affects my health. Get your head around the “we” concept.’

Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of global public health at Edinburgh University Medical School, was equally as damning of the new health secretary’s intervention.

She tweeted: ‘New UK health minister saying Covid is like flu. Same position 18 months into the pandemic.

‘We didn’t have to vaccinate the entire adult population against flu, or do mass community testing, or have lockdowns [because] hospitals full. I don’t understand this analogy.’

Alan McNally, professor of microbial evolutionary genomics at the University of Birmingham, said the shift in policy would lead to Covid running riot among young people.

He tweeted: ‘A year ago Brendan Wren and I wrote an editorial saying that bad decisions were going to make Covid an endemic disease, likely of children. 

‘This week government will make that an official policy. 

‘That’s a policy allowing one of deadliest infections in history run endemic.’

A spokesperson at the Department of Health pushed back on this characterisation of Mr Javid’s comments, telling the Daily Mail: ‘The health secretary did not say Covid was like flu. 

‘He said we need to learn to live with it and find ways to cope with it – in the same way as we do with flu.’ 

Addressing the nation at 5pm, Mr Johnson is also expected to issue new working from home guidance, publish the results of reviews into the use of vaccine passports and the future of social distancing guidance, and update the nation on care homes.

Mr Johnson said people would have to ‘exercise judgment’ to protect themselves from coronavirus.

Speaking before the announcement, the PM said: ‘Thanks to the successful rollout of our vaccination programme, we are progressing cautiously through our road map.

‘Today we will set out how we can restore people’s freedoms when we reach step four.

‘But I must stress that the pandemic is not over and that cases will continue to rise over the coming weeks.

‘As we begin to learn to live with this virus, we must all continue to carefully manage the risks from Covid and exercise judgment when going about our lives.’

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